When the Pre came out, both my brother and sister bought one. They both liked iPhones, but couldn't get them because they were on Sprint. I had an iPhone 3G.
They didn't like the keyboard, and the fact that I could grab the top and bottom half of the phone and twist them at least 10 degrees relative to each other was rather worrying. The Touchstone was fantastic, and I assume the only reason no one else has done it was because it's patented. However since the Touchstone cost $70 the only person I know who had one got it for free when their phone (when they were given away at some sales conference long after it was clear the phone was dead).
I though WebOS was very nice, and my siblings liked it. I did just a teeny bit of development for it, and thought it was a decent environment. I liked the documentation, and it was pretty easy to do. The simulator, which ran on VirtualBox (IIRC), was slow as hell. The phone liked to use gestures to trigger things, which was a bit unintuitive and was very difficult to trigger in the simulator.
However, I thought the card metaphor was fantastic. At the the time the iPhone didn't allow any multitasking at all. I still think the card metaphor is elegant. My mother has had an iPhone for two years and still doesn't know about the multitasking or how to close apps if she wanted to. They Apple or Google could buy just the card metaphor patent for a few million, I would say "do it".
But I always thought the main failing was apps. By the time the Pre came out the iPhone app store was already huge and the reason to get an iPhone. After a few months, Palm finally announced an app store and... nothing happened. It took months and months before they actually opened the store and let people download things. After it was open, only one or two apps would come out each month. The ones that did gave the impression the internal developers were making them as demo apps. If Palm had paid a few big app developers to port their apps, it would have gone a LONG way.
From the end user's point of view, the app market situation was a fiasco. The time between the announcement of the store and starting to get any recognizable apps was eons.
It doesn't surprise me that HP didn't fix things. The Touchpad was nice, but overpriced. The fact the first thing HP said was "We're putting it on our printers" wasn't reassuring in any way.
Agreed. I had an iPhone 4 for about a year when the Touchpad went to fire sale, and stayed up fairly late to order one online. I had heard great things about webOS, and the Touchpad looked like a bargain.
And it's great for reading Hacker News (overlooking that it is incapable of parsing the single quote char correctly on HN) and the odd Kindle book(on the beta Amazon webOS app that is unlikely to ever see another update). But all it really has done for me so far is validated that I will utilize a tablet device and made me want to buy a supported device. I want to do things like play higher end games, use Evernote, and watch Hulu/Netflix.
But oh well, maybe one day the open source effort will yield fruit. After I get a tablet that hasn't died yet, I will try putting Ubuntu on my Touchpad. I still really like webOS, and it does some things very well, better than my iPhone. But right now I don't see any light at the end of the tunnel.
They didn't like the keyboard, and the fact that I could grab the top and bottom half of the phone and twist them at least 10 degrees relative to each other was rather worrying. The Touchstone was fantastic, and I assume the only reason no one else has done it was because it's patented. However since the Touchstone cost $70 the only person I know who had one got it for free when their phone (when they were given away at some sales conference long after it was clear the phone was dead).
I though WebOS was very nice, and my siblings liked it. I did just a teeny bit of development for it, and thought it was a decent environment. I liked the documentation, and it was pretty easy to do. The simulator, which ran on VirtualBox (IIRC), was slow as hell. The phone liked to use gestures to trigger things, which was a bit unintuitive and was very difficult to trigger in the simulator.
However, I thought the card metaphor was fantastic. At the the time the iPhone didn't allow any multitasking at all. I still think the card metaphor is elegant. My mother has had an iPhone for two years and still doesn't know about the multitasking or how to close apps if she wanted to. They Apple or Google could buy just the card metaphor patent for a few million, I would say "do it".
But I always thought the main failing was apps. By the time the Pre came out the iPhone app store was already huge and the reason to get an iPhone. After a few months, Palm finally announced an app store and... nothing happened. It took months and months before they actually opened the store and let people download things. After it was open, only one or two apps would come out each month. The ones that did gave the impression the internal developers were making them as demo apps. If Palm had paid a few big app developers to port their apps, it would have gone a LONG way.
From the end user's point of view, the app market situation was a fiasco. The time between the announcement of the store and starting to get any recognizable apps was eons.
It doesn't surprise me that HP didn't fix things. The Touchpad was nice, but overpriced. The fact the first thing HP said was "We're putting it on our printers" wasn't reassuring in any way.