WebOS on Palm Pre (Lisa Brewster / Flickr CC)
Congratulations HP, you've managed to get a good news story out of your WebOS property. The operating system for mobile phones that has some historical traces of Palm OS is will be available via some form of open source licence.
In theory anyone will be able to grab the code, compile it, and run their hardware on WebOS. The practical reality is that HP have killed WebOS. Like Captain Oates going for a stroll, the OS is still walking, but we'll never see it again.
Without a strong corporate guiding hand, WebOS will never keep pace with hardware reference designs; it will never gather the support of a significant number of software developers; and it will never have the ecosystem of music, video, and digital media that a modern platform needs to survive.
Without a hardware partner willing to work at the base levels needed for tight component integration it will be almost impossible to have an efficient electrical construction that fits in the increasingly small volume demanded by fashion conscious consumers.
Without a proven application store that will guarantee a profit for developers, the modern currency of a smartphone will not arrive to attract consumers to the platform.
When the Symbian platform moved to Open Source, it had an advantage in Nokia. That one company was the champion the British OS needed. Now Nokia is focused on Windows Phone, sales of their Symbian devices are slowing.
If someone was going to make a run with WebOS, they would have bought it by now. WebOS had its chance - from a strong debut at CES in January 2009, it took too long to get to market, and when it did with US network Sprint it failed to make an impact with customers, businesses, developers, or the media.
Maybe we'll see a plucky start-up run up some boutique tablets or handsets, but runs of five or ten thousand do not make a platform, they make a curiosity. Maybe a Chinese OEM will stop with custom Android and move to custom WebOS devices, but why re-invent the wheel?
The handful of WebOS fans online shouldn't be given false hope, the chances of WebOS making a true comeback are right up there with the Cubs winning the World Series and the United Kingdom ever winning the Eurovision Song Contest again.
