HP WebOS is popular operating system which is specially designed for mobile devices including smart phones, PDAs and Tablet PCs. Additionally it is used in high end printers as well. It’s developed by HP improving previous PalmOS. The current version of WebOS is version 3.0 and this came to the stage and attracted public spot light with latest release of Hp TouchPad. The WebOS is having many brand new concepts, cool user friendly interfaces and much more advanced functionality. Hence, after the release of HP TouchPad most of the people started talking about its uniqueness and became a one of the most discussed topic in the world media.
Bit of History
Sometimes ago there was huge trend for palm top computer and at that time mobile devices were only used for voice calls and SMS. Most of the professionals and businessman used palm top computers to access internet on the go and manage their busy life. PalmOS was the most popular mobile operation system in that time.
It started as PalmOS back in 2002 and then bought by a Japanese company after noticing its potentiality. It was getting popular and was there in many Palm top devices. After identifying its success HP bough it and started developing it. The result was WobOS. They transform it to a multipurpose platform from previous Palm Top device operation system.
Today it continuously evolves as a proprietary product of HP. It’s used in many Tablet devices, smartphones and in printers very successfully introducing many brand new concepts to the mobile device world.
Cool Features
‘Card’ Interface
One of the major and brand new features in WebOS is its card interface. It could be identified as a major competition for popular Windows based interface which was there for long time. It’s mimicking organization deck of card. You can go through cards, select one and make it full screen, if you don’t want one any more flick it away to the top.
Interface normally gives you icon dock at the bottom for you to open a card. One card represents one open application. If there are many application opened, they will displayed in the main window once you hit the hardware button available in the device. You can use touch screen to go through cards. Tap on the card will make it full screen and you can use the application. To close an application, you can flick the card to top in the all card view. There is a gesture area at the bottom of the display. Using that you can use few touch gestures to control the behavior of the applications that are opened including ‘Go Back’ and ‘Go Forward’
I see this as really cool and convenient lay out for mobile devices with relatively smaller screen than desktop computers. You can easily manage your ‘Cards’ and go though them even in a smaller screen very easily. And the way they have designed to close a card impressed me without wasting extra screen area and making it very user friendly. With the combination of touch and gestures it make pretty solid and streamlined way to interact with the device.
Multitasking
Multitasking is ignored as an important feature by some competitive operation systems for a long time. However, WebOS provide multitasking to the application platform utilizing devices hardware to the optimum level. With the aid of ‘Card’ interface you can easily manage applications that are opened simultaneously. Whenever there is a notification, it will be displayed in the bottom line of the screen. So you can switch to the required application very easily without closing the current one. This comes in handy when you are dealing with SMS and emails.
Other than communication application this will be useful to run multimedia application. You can listen to your song while you surf. In the case you need to switch to another open application, all you have to do it, hit the phone main hardware button, flip the card and tap the one you want.
Searching
Searching is one of my favorite feature in WebOS. It allows you to search ‘Everything’ on the phone in one search application. This reminds me new searching in Windows 7. Most of the other operation systems use separate search for each items like contact, SMS and Email. In WebOS it’s really convenient to search whatever you want and also see the related other items to the search term in the same interface. If you search for email sent by ‘Malinda’ at the same time you will be able to see the Malinda’s contact details as well.
Communication Management
When it comes to calling and SMS WebOS provide very user-friendly interfaces to get the work done with minimum steps. However, nowadays calling and SMS has became the least important feature in a mobile device with the latest web surfing and social media. However, WebOS has put extra effort to make SMS, IMs and Emails more readable. They are arranged in a threaded discussion way, so that you can get a very clear idea about what you are discussing very easily by looking at previous messages in the thread.
Synergy
Synergy is another feature that attracted me a lot. It crawls through all the types of data in the device and prepare a index. Using that index it could display personal data related to individual in once single card which is really smart. This comes in handy when you need find some ones email address, SMS number, Web address and Facebook profile at the same time. Synergy will collect entire data from your activities and present to you in once single card.
It Goes Online
WebOS is having a browser named ‘Web’ and its providing entire facilities required to surf web in a easy and fast way. Its main page allows you to keep some quick launch icons. Other than browsing WebOS having facility to synchronize your files to a online space which will be very useful for professionals and businessman. It could be used as a global access point as well as a backup mechanism. The built in service is called as ‘Hotsync’ and it keep your files online in a cloud based service.
Application Development
One of the major contributing factors to any mobile operation system would be its third party application support. That was the main reason to iPhone and Android to be popular. As long as there are many applications user won’t get bored with the device. Every day they can try out something new.
Having the objective of giving the maximum support to WebOS application developer, HP has come up with HP Palm Developer program. They provide all the required development tools, emulators to test application in the development environment and support documentation. They allow you to develop application using standard HTML, CSS and JS as well as C/C++. As a result there are many applications out there for WebOS, yet it’s not much as iPhone and Android as it seems.
Conclusion
WebOS is pretty solid looking stuff, and probably it will give tight competition to iOS and Android in the near future. As the same time it has good hardware support as well with HP’s most advance technology. As a big plus points they have really cool brand new features like ‘Card’ interface and Synergy. I believe these will take the WebOS to a significant market share in near future.
Tags: #HP #WebOS