iPad Excels At WebOS Just Like The Mac At Windows

We know that the iPad played a big role in the demise of HP and WebOS. Yet, we're starting to hear more details about what happened behind the scenes, and apparently, the iPad's technical superiority might have played just as big of a role as its incredible sales. As first reported by TheNextWeb, and then detailed by AppleInsider, HP/ex-Palm WebOS engineers were actually very frustrated with the hardware put together to run their OS as well. Indeed, as many reviews pointed out, WebOS was somewhat slow on the TouchPad, despite of its decent internals. The rumor has it that, to highlight the problem, HP's engineers managed to run WebOS on an iPad, as detailed by the NextWeb:

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.

Incredible right? Yet, it's hard to believe this story as it's extremely complex to have another system than iOS run on an iPad. Not to mention that such a proof of concept wouldn't probably run fast at first as it's not optimized for the hardware. However, later reports including AppleInsider today suggest that HP's team actually got to run WebOS on the iPad as a WebApp in Mobile Safari, and knowing that the system is based on WebKit, this sounds much more likely. Either way, if this is true, this goes on to show that HP mismanaged WebOS and couldn't even produce decent hardware despite of being the world's biggest PC vendor. This might have played a role in HP's decision to discontinue all WebOS hardware. The brighter side of this story is that WebOS is a great platform for app developement, as it's all based on WebKit. If it can really run on the iPad as a WebApp, there might be a future for it. That, or HP is leaking this story to convince more companies to license an otherwise slow and dying platform. [Image Credit: Business Insider]

Related articles