HP to Open Source WebOS

Let's face it, it's not like the TP has been on the market long enough to have been used for a year by someone, sold, refurbished, and then re-sold. Under normal circumstances, I'd feel pretty good buying one of these as a refurb BUT I have an issue with them being priced the same as the brand spankin' new clearance priced ones a few months ago.

Past that, there's a chance that the TP flippers on E-Bay and Craigslist might drop prices because some may view WebOS as "officially dead" now after today's announcement. Or, prices may plummet if a rock-solid Android ICS port doesn't materialize in the next month or two like so many people are assuming will happen.

Back to the open-sourcing: It's probably the best bit of news we could expect to have in light of everything else. My guess is HP shopped WebOS around to everyone and decided this was the next-best course of action to protect their investment and keep it from looking like an even worse debacle. And let's face it, Android is becoming less "open" and more "evil" with each passing day, so it'll be nice to see some sort of alternative.

I'd love to see some Chinese hardware company release a barebones ARM tablet where you can roll your own OS. Basically, take the general TouchPad specs, drop the IPS screen and camera, cut the RAM down to 512MB and go with a single-core 1Ghz CPU, and cut its internal storage down to 8GB. Sell it for $100-$120ish and try to undercut the Kindle Fire and Nook Colors of the world. I could definitely see one of the 2nd or even 3rd tier brands like like Cowon, Viewsonic, Huawei, Pandigital, Craig etc taking a chance on a "new" WebOS tablet.

Past that, it'd be even cooler to see HP release the Classic emulator from Motion Apps and see someone like Aceeca release a ruggedized 7" WebOS tablet that just happens to run Palm OS apps as well...
Pilot 1000->Pilot 5000->PalmPilot Pro->IIIe->Vx->m505->T|T->T|T2->T|C->T|T3->T|T5->Zodiac 2->TX->Verizon Treo 700P->Verizon Treo 755p->Verizon Moto Droid + Verizon Palm Centro-> Verizon Moto Droid X2 + Palm TX

There's simply no explaning the still-sluggish performance of the TouchPad even overclocked or on the rare 1.5Ghz 64GB and 4G versions other than a poorly-optimized or buggy OS. I'm no coder, but I would imagine it likely that WebOS, especially 2.x and below, must have an uminaginable amount of code bloat and inefficiency in its current form. What some of the 3rd party ROM modders have done for Android is phenimenal. You can get Gingerbread ROMs that (relaitvely) fly on the ancient HTC G1 or Droid 1, for example.

I don't doubt that someone could strip a lot of the excess fluff out of WebOS and get it to run quite nicely on an 1Ghz, 512MB RAM $99 or $150 tablet.

Richf, I think that one of the key challenges for the open source community is to get the latest OS running on certain pieces of dated hardware. I mean, we have seen Android 4.0 running on old PPC handhelds and even a Tungsten C: http://dgosblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/android.html

Throwing beefier specs at WebOS without no regard for optimizing the OS is one of the reasons Palm and HP both crashed and burned on the market. Look how the 20-month old iPhone 3GS still runs iOS5 quite well and sells in oodles. Yet a comparable Palm Pre or Pixi cannot even come close to running any of the latest versions of WebOS.

Pilot 1000->Pilot 5000->PalmPilot Pro->IIIe->Vx->m505->T|T->T|T2->T|C->T|T3->T|T5->Zodiac 2->TX->Verizon Treo 700P->Verizon Treo 755p->Verizon Moto Droid + Verizon Palm Centro-> Verizon Moto Droid X2 + Palm TX