The main problem faced by all HP Touchpad users is the scarcity of apps, but of course dual booting into Android is a good way to access apps that are unavailable. If all goes as it should, a better solution could arrive in just a few months, provided you are willing to help Phoenix International Communications in their attempt to resurrect OpenMobile’s ACL for webOS.

In case you are new to ACL, it’s Application Compatibility Layer, and it allows running of Android apps on non-Android devices. The webOS ACL will allow users to run Android apps alongside native webOS applications, and its alpha version appear to be working fine on a Touchpad as you will see in the video below.

Since OpenMobile worked on the project earlier, Phoenix is promising that the final build will be available for purchase and download by July. It’s a Kickstarter project and they have, at the time of writing this, managed $5,991 of the $35,000 goal with 24 days to go.

They are offering various gifts including a copy of the ACL software, their LED flashlight keychain, and even the developer’s Touchpad depending on how much you pledge.

[Source]

The post OpenMobile ACL For webOS Coming In July appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

After going through Palm and HP, webOS is now apparently being purchased by LG. The apparent plan is that webOS won’t appear on LG smartphones, but rather it will be used on LG Smart TVs. That’s the current plan, but LG isn’t ruling out the possibility that webOS could be adapted for their smartphones and tablets, too. That won’t be for a while though, as “we’ll apply this to the TV only” for the short term, said LG CTO Dr. Skott Ahn.

This also isn’t to say that LG is purchasing the entirety of webOS from Palm. It is acquiring the websites, documentation, source code and team for the client side, but it’s simply licensing other aspects like the webOS patents, apps catalog, updating system and several cloud-related components.

What’s interesting is that Dr. Ahn also mentioned that Android could be used “together” with webOS in some capacity, though he says the “cards” UI of webOS may provide a better user experience overall. Could this mean that the next skinned version of Android coming out of LG will utilize the webOS-inspired card system? And how will this be applied to the smart TV? I guess we’ll just have to wait and find out.

[Source]

The post WebOS to Live Again with LG and Smart TVs appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

So what ever happened to WebOS? HP’s WebOS certainly never managed to do all that well in the marketplace but it was still not a half-bad OS in reality. Luckily it has continued to live on as an open source project.

Any chance we’ll see it in any more commercial endeavors? Maybe. It seems that LG and HP once signed an agreement to use WebOS inside an LG Smart TV and it seems that LG is now looking for a way to use the HTML5-based OS inside of a future line of smart televisions. While LG has yet to officially announce anything specific, it will be interesting to see how this pans out. WebOS never managed to live up to its full potential, could it finally find a home in the world of smart televisions?

Rumors suggest the WebOS-running LG TV will debut at CES 2013. It also makes you wonder if LG-developed apps for WebOS could give the dying OS a little bit of an afterlife.
Anyone interested in such a Smart TV running on HP’s mobile OS?

[ source ]

The post Is a Web OS Smart TV is in the works by LG? appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

The HP TouchPad is a curious device, to say the least. It is hard to call it anything other than a failure, but it has certainly managed a fairly successful life after death, thanks in part to 2011 fire-sales of the unit by companies like Best Buy, combined with the flexibility of its hardware.

So what makes the HP TouchPad a favorite among tinkerers? The flexibility to run multiple operating systems, outside of its intended WebOS. Using a boot manager program called Moboot, many users have successfully created dual-boots between WebOS and Android. The interesting thing about the tablet is that there has been success with installing both Android 2.3 and Android 4.0 ICS.

Taking things a step further though, xda-developers forum member MikeyCriggz has posted instructions for taking a TouchPad that’s already running Android and webOS and adding Arch Linux to the mix. You’ll need Moboot installed, but the guide walks you through the process of adding Arch Linux to your tablet and adding it to the boot menu as well.

Arch is still a little rough around the edges though, with a lack of mic, camera, and sound support. Bluetooth doesn’t work either. Still, you have to applaud HP for creating such an interesting and flexible tablet. Too bad the company didn’t see the potential for the device that many in the hacker and developer communities have.

[ source ]

The post HP TouchPad Triple Boots Android, WebOS, and ArchLInux appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

To be fair, the open source Open webOS 1.0 isn’t exactly ready for primetime yet, but HP is dedicated to it. The current timeline calls for a completion of the open source project by September, but there will be updates along the way that will get you that much closer to the final product.

Going along with this development is the release of Enyo, the application framework that was used with webOS 3.0 and the HP TouchPad. That’s available to devs and hackers right now. In fact, a complete refresh called Enyo 2.0 is also in the works and it will not be tied to Webkit at all. This means that developers can create apps that are fully browser-independent, working just fine in everything from IE to Firefox to Chrome. For Open webOS 1.0, they’re also making a switch to a standard Linux kernel, not unlike what you get with Google Android.

Check out the proposed timeline above. While the beta builds for devs will get rolled out every month or so, regular end users won’t get their official hands on a version of Open webOS 1.0 until “late summer.” That may include webOS devices beyond the TouchPad too, like the Pre, Pixi, Veer series and who knows, maybe a TouchPad Go.

[ source ]

The post HP Makes Good On Open Source Promise With Open webOS 1.0 appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

The post HP releases webOS as open source project appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Recently, Android Community has calculated the total sales of tablets from January up until October. According to their figures, HP Touchpad took the second place for overall tablet sales. This is to say that the HP Touchpad is the best selling tablet among non-Apple products. Android Community tends to attribute the HP Touchpad popularity to the existence of an Android port for it: CyanogenMod 7 Alpha. An upcoming Ice Cream Sandwich Sandwich port will render HP Touchpad even more powerful and versatile.

However, the true reason for such a success is quite simple: an August fire sale  of HP Touchpads at $99 and $149 price points. They were all running webOS back then (except for couple devices that slipped to retail having Qualcomm’s developer versions of Android 2.2).

Do these figures (estimated at 200,000 units) indicate webOS popularity then? No. It might be a different story though if HP decided to release a new tablet some time in 2012 running WebOS. Right now it seems likely that HP will make the switch to Windows 8 on their tablets, though Android is a possibility as well.

A hypothetical tablet based on Qualcomm’s SoC could possibly give webOS another chance at the market. If HP were to take its almost finished HP TouchPad GO tablets to the market, there would be another opportunity for WebOS to shine as well. Unfortunately, this is all speculation and it looks like HP just doesn’t have any interest in keeping WebOS alive, despite its heavy investment.

HP Touchpad might stay as a sales champion now, but not for very long, as holiday sales will show a major increase for Kindle Fires and NOOK Tablets and iPads too. Amazon and Barnes and Noble certainly hope so, at least.

The post HP Touchpad, The Second Best-Selling Tablet? appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

It’s been a while since HP has erased every single thing related to Palm. Now, the whole world has come to know that all this costed HP nothing less than $3.3 Billion American Dollars. To this amount, we have to add $1.2 Billion, which was the amount that HP spent while buying Palm. As a total, you can see that HP has come up to $5 Billion in losses; this related to their mobile industry.

WebOS was, in my opinion, the new OS with the most potential of becoming the next generation “top selling” Mobile OS. However, this will no longer occur thanks to HP’s desicion. The reasons can be divided into two big areas. For one side, we can find a small ammount of mobile designs created. Probably, if HP would have invested more in this area, the opportunities for the company would have been much better. Now, the second reason is that HP, in order to create WebOS mobile devices, would have had to create expensive hardware for Scanners and Printers.

As HP’s new CEO, Meg Whitman, said: “HP wil make from now on “prudent investments”. Unfortunately, she didn’t give further details. Now, what do you think that HP will create in the future for it’s mobile devices? Will they create a new OS? or will they adopt platforms such as Windows Phone 7 or Android?

The post Wiping-Out WebOS Will Cost HP $3.3 Billion More appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Palm may have been the company to produce webOS, but Mozilla might be the company to produce one of the first truly web-based operating systems for smartphones. Dubbed Boot 2 Gecko, it’s a mobile OS that relies primarily on the web… not unlike the Chrome OS for Chromebooks.

The new OS is currently under development as the Mozilla team is working on its “proprietary, single-vendor stacks.” Various APIs for the camera, phone, SMS, and so on are also be developed. The idea here is to have a truly stripped down OS for contacts and phone, and getting everything else through the web.

You’ll notice that early drawings depict an icon-based OS, which will largely fall in line with people already familiar with iOS, Android, and even webOS. We also hear that Boot 2 Gecko will use Android for booting and drivers, but HTML5 for most other functions. In any case, I’m not sure we need yet another OS option. We’ve already seen the slow death of webOS, the diminishing market share of BB, the less than optimistic outlook for QNX/BBX. Even WP7.5 is having a tough time.

In any case, I’m sure the legal types in Cupertino are already readying their papers for another patent infringement suit. I can feel it in my bones.

The post Early Look: Boot 2 Gecko Mozilla Web-Based Mobile OS appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Unfortunately, just about everyone is out of stock. I tried calling around to a few different stores last night — Best Buy, Future Shop, The Source — and they all had the same response: we’re out of stock. I even tried to do the clever thing and get a price match done at Staples, which was still listing the TouchPad at its already reduced $399.99 price point, and get 10% of the difference… but I was clearly not the only one to come up with that hare-brained scheme.

Even if you’re willing to bump up to the 32GB model, which has been universally slashed down to $149.99 from $499.99, you’re still going to have a really hard time finding one in stock. People had absolutely no interest in the TouchPad when its price was on par with other tablets, but now they can’t stock enough of them at this ridiculously low price.

And I can’t blame the consumers, really. The TouchPad is still a decent device, webOS is great (even if it may not get the full HP support), and this price is unbelievable. Some stores even have webOS phones like the Veer and Pre3 at bargain bin prices. Good luck hunting down a cheap TouchPad, but there you have it. Now that webOS has a larger established user base, maybe HP’d be interested in licensing it out to other companies?

The post Price on HP TouchPad tablet plummets to $99.99 appeared first on Mobile Magazine.