Reminiscing over WebOS

In my previous posting I stated that I charged up my old Palm Pixi WebOS smartphone to use as a Sprint RF signal tester. First of all, I immediately noticed how small the screen is on my Pixi versus my current Nexus S 4G. Secondly, I started playing around with the WebOS system again and ran the calendar and email app and I forgot how good that OS was. If you introduced it today, running on better hardware I think it would be a big success.

After using the Apple iOS and Android OS, I still think WebOS is superior. Apps popup up as animated cards which you can minimize and shuffle around, and flick off the screen. It has true multitasking, while with iOS and Android apps are suspended or stopped if they are in the background. Everything on the screen looked fresh and clean. It’s really a shame that Palm couldn’t continue with their phone line and was instead bought by HP and completely abandoned. Sure, WebOS lives on in Open Source land, but that really isn’t the same as a fully promoted smartphone operating system.

I think that OS failed because Palm didn’t have appealing hardware, and they took too long to come out with these new phones. If they had better phones and produced them quicker, things may be different now.

Those were the days…

Pondering switching cell phone carriers

Up until 10 months ago, I’ve never owned a personal cell phone. I did have a phone, but it was a company phone which I used for both business and personal use. I started with a LG candy bar phone back in 2000 on Sprint, migrated to a popular Nokia phone, then a few Motorola phones, then over to my first smartphone, the Motorola Q running Windows Mobile 5 OS. At that point, my employer switched from Sprint to Verizon, and I finally got an iPhone 4 to use for about 6 months before I left that job for new one. My current position with my new employer doesn’t provide a cell phone, so I needed to venture out in cell phone land and make some decisions on which phone and carrier I should choose for my first personal cell phone purchase.

Since my wife had been using Sprint for the last 10 years or so, it made sense for me to just add a 2nd line to her account and get a shared minutes family plan, especially since Sprint offers offers unlimited data on smartphones. So I made my first cell phone purchase to be a Palm Pixi WebOS phone (mainly because I had planned to do some WebOS app development on the side). That worked out great, and I loved the cool animated windows popping up, and swiping them off the screen when done. I stuck with the Pixi for almost 2 years, and when Palm started to falter as a company I decided to switch to an Android smartphone (again, so I can do some Android app development) and I chose the best at the time which was the Nexus S 4G.