HP’s WebOS team almost certainly had an idea that the company’s new tablet, the TouchPad, had very little chance of challenging Apple’s dominance in the tablet market, as the company’s webOS operating system was running “over twice as fast” on its rival’s iPad 2 tablet, a source close to the subject revealed to The Next Web. Update below.
With HP announcing it is to cease development of its webOS devices, we learned that before the HP’s TouchPad tablet and Pre smartphones were even released, everyone within the webOS team “wanted them gone”.
The hardware reportedly stopped the team from innovating beyond certain points because it was slow and imposed constraints, which was highlighted when webOS was loaded on to Apple’s iPad device and found to run the platform significantly faster than the device for which it was originally developed.
With a focus on web technologies, webOS could be deployed in the iPad’s Mobile Safari browser as a web-app; this produced similar results, with it running many times faster in the browser than it did on the TouchPad.
When HP announced its acquisition of Palm, the computing giant had already built the TouchPad hardware that sits on the shelves today. Basically, the TouchPad was a two-year old piece of hardware that the webOS team equipped with their tablet-friendly platform.
Our source also indicated that HP also had plans to release a 7-inch version of the TouchPad, the TouchPad Go. This was already in production and before yesterday was expected to launch in the coming months. It is unknown whether it will ever see a public launch now. The TouchPad Go was seen as a better looking and nicer feeling device that had the potential to sell, with it believed that sales of the device would outpace the TouchPad’s if it had been released before its larger cousin.
We’ve also heard that HP in fact already had the next generation of TouchPad in the works. The details are very fuzzy here but we believe that it would be a lighter model with a higher-resolution ‘retina’ display and a metal body. Nothing out of the ordinary if HP truly wanted to make a splash with its next potential offering.
Because webOS is limited to working on the Qualcomm chipset, potential hardware partners would need to have a special version of webOS written for their hardware. This makes it hard to determine a likely licensee, but we know that HP has already been working on porting webOS to other architectures, including Apple’s A5 SoC.
With development stopping on future HP webOS devices, the webOS team face an uncertain future. HP has said it will license the platform, prompting suggestions that smartphone vendors including HTC and Samsung could look to the operating system given the recent developments between Google and Motorola.
If you are interested in reading how HP came to the decision to kill off its webOS devices and how different teams came to learn of the news, we suggest you look at our inside look at what happened.
Update: As reader Joshua Tewell points out in the comments below, webOS has and continues to run on other chipsets besides Qualcomm’s. This supports the fact that webOS may have been adapted to other chipsets, but it makes the statement in the article above that webOS is ‘limited to working on the Qualcomm chipset’ inaccurate. Thank you for the information Joshua.
Just to clarify one more thing as well, we have heard that Enyo apps were tested on the iPad, although we were also specifically told that webOS was tested natively in some fashion on the iPad. It’s unclear which of these tests the speed estimate was based on.
http://www.supershops.org
m,,.,.
“Because webOS is limited to working on the Qualcomm chipset”
there is a working webos emulator for x86 and it runs just fine.
everyone in the webos community is beside themselves.
“Because webOS is limited to working on the Qualcomm chipset”
This article and claim is garbage — you should learn a little more about tech before you write about it.
The Palm Pre, Pre Plus, and Pre 2 ALL use Texas Instruments chipsets (OMAP) — NOT QUALCOMM.
Here is what the Bozo thinks…
http://bozoworld.wordpress.com/2011/08/19/ichange/
This is ridiculous. Shame on you for posting this hearsay.
This article is libelous. Any person who believes this is worthless.
Why is it libelous?
@Graeme West It makes obviously false and malicious claims about the TouchPad hardware. webOS is not even compatible with the iPad’s hardware. Any claims that they’ve developed it to run on there is blatantly farfetched and untrue.
@Ignition Unlimited@Graeme West “With a focus on web technologies, webOS could be deployed in the iPad’s Mobile Safari browser as a web-app; this produced similar results, with it running many times faster in the browser than it did on the TouchPad.” – it says it was run as a web app, not natively.
@Ignition Unlimited@Graeme West “With a focus on web technologies, webOS could be deployed in the iPad’s Mobile Safari browser as a web-app; this produced similar results, with it running many times faster in the browser than it did on the TouchPad.” – it says it was run as a web app, not natively.
http://www.supershops.org
rrereer
The A9 is supposed to be significantly faster than the A8 ( I think it’s advertised as about 25% faster), so it’s not too surprising that it’s faster on the iPad. I think the “over twice as fast” comment from the source is probably exaggeration.
@Ignition Unlimited@Graeme West Actually webOS had been tweaked internally to work on several competing platforms.
@Ignition Unlimited@Graeme West Actually webOS had been tweaked internally to work on several competing platforms.
@etx313 It’s not hearsay.
@etx313 It’s not hearsay.
@Nick Kay “The combination of webOS and Qualcomm’s high performance chipsets allows HP to deliver a full web and multimedia experience in sleek smartphone and tablet designs, meeting consumer demand to stay connected to the information and content that’s most important to them.”
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@Damon Hendrickson webOS has been tweaked internally to work on a couple of other platforms.
@Shawn J. Goff We actually heard much faster.
@Shawn J. Goff We actually heard much faster.
It says it was run both natively and as a web app.
I highly doubt both statements, however. While the iPad 2 has been jailbroken, the effort to port a new OS to a closed box would be great.
Even though webOS apps maybe based on web technology, webOS is an OS, with interface to the hardware, handles task scheduling, etc. I doubt the device drivers were written in JavaScript and easily portable to Safari.
It’s more likely that some of the webOS apps are based on web technology and easily portable to Safari. I could believe they ran the same app on webOS and Safari and found a difference.
@Ignition Unlimited The article doesn’t give much detail about how it was done, but I can’t see any “obviously false and malicious claims”. There isn’t enough information in the article for you to assert that.
@Ignition Unlimited The article doesn’t give much detail about how it was done, but I can’t see any “obviously false and malicious claims”. There isn’t enough information in the article for you to assert that.
@Peter Evensen webOS renders via webkit, I’m guessing the browser would be the easiest place to get it to run, now ‘run’ and ‘run fully’ are two different things.
I’m not sure if my comment was edited or if I’m going crazy, but what I’m mentioning above is the architecture: Apple’s is ARM Cortex A9, Qualcomm’s is ARM Cortex A8. Those designations are different than Apple calling their chips A4 and A5 – that’s their model number, and nothing to do with the architecture version; they’re easy to confuse.
@Shawn J. Goff No worries, and we definitely don’t edit comments! We will delete spammers, but that’s about it. But yeah, we did hear much quicker than double. But we can only report what we were told, I obviously have no first-hand experience with it.
@Shawn J. Goff No worries, and we definitely don’t edit comments! We will delete spammers, but that’s about it. But yeah, we did hear much quicker than double. But we can only report what we were told, I obviously have no first-hand experience with it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearsay
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearsay
@Matthew Panzarino That was obviously advertising the newer hardware which had the new chips.
@Joshua Tewell Right. And considering that the first person involved in this exchange had direct experience, then it’s not hearsay.
@Matthew Panzarino As such, it is not “limited to working on the Qualcomm chipset”
@Joshua Tewell Yes.
@Joshua Tewell Officially it is.
@Joshua Tewell Officially it is.
@Matthew Panzarino “Hearsay is information gathered by one person from another person concerning some event, condition, or thing of which the first person had no direct experience.” See, in this, you’re the first person. You even proved the point earlier with your comment “But we can only report what we were told, I obviously have no first-hand experience with it.” Regardless, I’m not attacking the idea of posting hearsay, as that is all that “scoops” and “rumors” are, and without it, we’d have no new news. I’m just supporting the definition, in this post.
@Joshua Tewell The first person was the source.
@Matthew Panzarino The OMAP 3430 (ARM Cortex A8) was not a Qualcomm chipset, and though they stopped updating it, the chip was still officially supported, as far as I am aware, because my phone’s still running with it.
@Matthew Panzarino But the source didn’t publish the information as far as I can tell, and unless you have provided that information, i.e. the actual source, for reference, then it’s still technically hearsay. But again, that’s what the news world is based on, and I don’t fault you for that. I do, however, fault the contents of the article and don’t believe that a slower processor would run a foreign OS better than the hardware it was developed on, but as I can’t prove it, it doesn’t really matter, does it? Keep on reporting what you can, though, because without it, we have no news.
@Matthew Panzarino But the source didn’t publish the information as far as I can tell, and unless you have provided that information, i.e. the actual source, for reference, then it’s still technically hearsay. But again, that’s what the news world is based on, and I don’t fault you for that. I do, however, fault the contents of the article and don’t believe that a slower processor would run a foreign OS better than the hardware it was developed on, but as I can’t prove it, it doesn’t really matter, does it? Keep on reporting what you can, though, because without it, we have no news.
@Joshua Tewell Cool, thanks for the information, I’ll make sure an addendum is added.
This is interesting.
This is interesting.
This is interesting.
@Joshua Tewell@Matthew Panzarino
“”Hearsay is information gathered by one person from another person concerning some event, condition, or thing of which the first person had no direct experience.”
By this definition, anything reported in the news would be considered hearsay. After all, those news reporters, writers, and anchor-desk people can’t have been the originators of the news in every story they report on.
Should be quite interesting to see how that all works out.
http://www.total-anon.at.tc
I work for HP. I tried out the TouchPad. The version of WebOS we had was chunky (intermittent freezes), slow (3+ seconds to load the week view in calendar app), and has too few apps to be usable. Additionally, there was no VGA dongle for connecting to projectors to give presos. We’re all glad that Apple iPads and iPhones will become much more prevalent now.
most people probably don’t realized that WebOS apps can be built completely on web technologies using the Mojo (older devices) or Enyo (newer WebOS devices like the TouchPad) app frameworks. While there is a native API for gaming, many apps are written using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, thus “WebOS”. Palm/HP offers a app emulator tool that runs in any browser. Thus the article is probably talking about WebOS apps based on Mojo/Enyo running faster on iPad’s safari browser than on TouchPad’s webkit-based browser. Most reviews have shown the TouchPad’s browser to be excruciatingly slow in rendering. Not sure if this is a hardware problem vs a software problem (optimizing the webkit-based rendering of WebOS apps)
@joachimv Very good information, thank you for posting. This corroborates with what we heard.
@etx313 I don’t think is shameful, but more details would make this article a bit more (slightly) believable.
@etx313 I don’t think is shameful, but more details would make this article a bit more (slightly) believable.
If this needs to be ported over to other chips, then it couldn’t have been running on the iPad. That’s a proprietary design with no public specifications for the A5 chip. I don’t see how they would have gotten it working at all.
I label that statement about it working on an iPad therefor as bogus.
@Mel Gross Android runs on iOS hardware. Why wouldn’t webOS?
Source? Exactly.
Apple’s A5 is an in house design, built upon the A9 Architecture, but tweaked to give even better performance than originally designed.
@Ignition Unlimited Android works on iOS using iBoot I think. They can install it on the iPad, but instead of using the Android ROM, they can use a customized version of the WebOS ROM. After all, you can install WebOS onto your computer with an emulator like Parallels or Fusion.
@Ignition Unlimited Android works on iOS using iBoot I think. They can install it on the iPad, but instead of using the Android ROM, they can use a customized version of the WebOS ROM. After all, you can install WebOS onto your computer with an emulator like Parallels or Fusion.
@Ignition Unlimited Android works on iOS using iBoot I think. They can install it on the iPad, but instead of using the Android ROM, they can use a customized version of the WebOS ROM. After all, you can install WebOS onto your computer with an emulator like Parallels or Fusion.
There’s so much wrong in this article I don’t even know where to start, so I’ll just leave this here.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4658/its-not-qualcomms-fault-dispelling-touchpad-myths/2
First of all, there is no formal report for your statement, so it is just an unconfirmed information.
Secondly, even if it is true, it only tells that Apple’s HW is better. It would be more meaningful If the source said the webOS runs twice as fast as iOS or android on the same HW platform.
See, if the webOS took 3 seconds, as one of the commens calimed, to get something done; it would still take 1.5 seconds to finish the job on iPad, not an iimressive result, isn’t it?
Thanks for the link, Anandtech is always very thorough. They did have a couple of details wrong however as our source said that it was running natively as well as in the browser. The performance delta in the bottom graph in the post is also telling.
@Matthew Panzarino I highly doubt that the whole OS was running natively, let alone in the browser. That’s a massive undertaking to confirm what you imply they already know- that the iPad would perform better, since it was being compared to “two year old hardware.” You also havent given any evidence of it other than “our source says so”, and the article even goes back on that claim somewhat by admitting it hasn’t even been made clear to what extent the OS was running on an iPad. There’s a very large difference between the whole OS running natively and a few select features being ported to test the performance difference.
Finally, the idea that “With a focus on web technologies, webOS could be deployed in the iPad’s Mobile Safari browser as a web-app” is somewhat ruining your credibility for me. If my phone was marketed as focusing on Camera technologies, I doubt I could port android to my Nikon SLR. Either I’m misinterpreting what was meant by that sentence or there’s a severe gap in knowledge present which makes me doubt the validity of what is being said in the rest of the article.
@Matthew Panzarino I highly doubt that the whole OS was running natively, let alone in the browser. That’s a massive undertaking to confirm what you imply they already know- that the iPad would perform better, since it was being compared to “two year old hardware.” You also havent given any evidence of it other than “our source says so”, and the article even goes back on that claim somewhat by admitting it hasn’t even been made clear to what extent the OS was running on an iPad. There’s a very large difference between the whole OS running natively and a few select features being ported to test the performance difference.
Finally, the idea that “With a focus on web technologies, webOS could be deployed in the iPad’s Mobile Safari browser as a web-app” is somewhat ruining your credibility for me. If my phone was marketed as focusing on Camera technologies, I doubt I could port android to my Nikon SLR. Either I’m misinterpreting what was meant by that sentence or there’s a severe gap in knowledge present which makes me doubt the validity of what is being said in the rest of the article.
@thecloud I didn’t write this article, so I can’t speak to the exact choice of words. I am personally aware that running individual webOS apps in an iPad web browser is completely possible, but that, yes, that is a far cry from running the whole OS. We are confident, however, that the information the article is based on came from a reliable source.
As an aside, thank you for taking the time to comment in the way that you did, we appreciate the focused and intelligent points that you presented, it’s a welcome addition to the conversation.
@thecloud I didn’t write this article, so I can’t speak to the exact choice of words. I am personally aware that running individual webOS apps in an iPad web browser is completely possible, but that, yes, that is a far cry from running the whole OS. We are confident, however, that the information the article is based on came from a reliable source.
As an aside, thank you for taking the time to comment in the way that you did, we appreciate the focused and intelligent points that you presented, it’s a welcome addition to the conversation.
he was probably talking about the toolkit. mojo was the old i forgot the name of the new thing. that one does indeed run in any webkit browser. so yes, that could theoretically run a lot faster on ipad. because as we all know webkit engine on the latest ipad is much faster than all others. they use webkit2, there was something about special jit features only enabled in the native browser of iphone and ipad, leaving apps using webkit engine internally at a performance disadvantage. either the hp devs are too shitty to know or you guys suck at writing the article. get the facts straight please. smearing sux
- Reza
he was probably talking about the toolkit. mojo was the old i forgot the name of the new thing. that does indeed run in any webkit browser. so yes, that could theoretically run a lot faster on ipad. because as we all know webkit engine on the latest ipad is much faster than all others. they use webkit2, there was something about special jit features only enabled in the native browser of iphone and ipad, leaving apps using webkit engine internally at a performance disadvantage. either the hp devs have no clue or you guys just write for the sensational effect. get the facts straight please. smearing sux
- Reza
he was probably talking about the toolkit. mojo was the old i forgot the name of the new thing. that does indeed run in any webkit browser. so yes, that could theoretically run a lot faster on ipad. because as we all know webkit engine on the latest ipad is much faster than all others. they use webkit2, there was something about special jit features only enabled in the native browser of iphone and ipad, leaving apps using webkit engine internally at a performance disadvantage. either the hp devs have no clue or you guys just write for the sensational effect. get the facts straight please. smearing sux
- Reza
he was probably talking about the toolkit. mojo was the old i forgot the name of the new thing. that does indeed run in any webkit browser. so yes, that could theoretically run a lot faster on ipad. because as we all know webkit engine on the latest ipad is much faster than all others. they use webkit2, there was something about special jit features only enabled in the native browser of iphone and ipad, leaving apps using webkit engine internally at a performance disadvantage. either the hp devs have no clue or you guys just write for the sensational effect. get the facts straight please. smearing sux
- Reza
Lot of misinformation out there. I found this article enlightening, although very technical:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4658/its-not-qualcomms-fault-dispelling-touchpad-myths/1
This one may be easier to read:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4658/its-not-qualcomms-fault-dispelling-touchpad-myths/1
A lot of misinformation out there.
This article should help:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4658/its-not-qualcomms-fault-dispelling-touchpad-myths/1
This one may be easier to read:
http://techglob.com/2011/08/28/webos-never-ran-on-ipad-2-hp-touchpad-hardware-vindicated/