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LG acquires webOS from HP, plans to use it in smart TV platform
- pegas123 14y agoIt actually makes a lot of sense and a great opportunity if you can take your eyes from that big screen. Palm as a remote.
- barredo 14y agoIt's hard to imagine a worse ending to the WebOS software.
- lukifer 14y agoThe worst ending (darkest timeline?) would be WebOS not getting used for anything at all. I'm curious to see if it will stay open-source. At this point, though, Firefox OS has much more mindshare as a full-stack mobile web OS anyway.
- Indyan 14y agoOpera also has its own product for smart TVs and set top boxes, but not quite a full fledged mobile OS.
- calinet6 14y agoThe problem is that anything could have much more mindshare. WebOS has negative mindshare; a new product built from the ground up with modern technology actually has a better chance of success (and indeed, that's likely to happen).
- networked 14y ago>WebOS has negative mindshare I wouldn't be so categorical about that. There's at least a minority of users, most of them technical, that really appreciated WebOS for its capacity for multitasking and the UI, if nothing else [1]. (How relevant would this be in a TV OS is debatable.) Even today WebOS remains a good platform for hacking with an unofficial app marketplace [2] that's still actively maintained and offers, among other things, two "real" Linux distributions (Ubuntu and Debian chroots). I keep a Palm Pre Plus with Debian myself for use in various experiments (like making a time-lapse camera). I got it for cheap when it was clear that WebOS is in decline but now I (along with many others who did the same) would be in the market for a new WebOS device if one came out, though probably not a TV. [1] See, e.g., comments right here on HN: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=webos+multitasking&start=0 http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=webos+..., http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=webos+ui&start=0 http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=webos+.... [2] http://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/Application:Preware http://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/Application:Preware
- happycube 14y agoOpen WebOS is under the Apache 2 license, so no take-backs.
- RexRollman 14y agoSeems fitting to me, as Palm bought BeOS, accomplished nothing with it, and they sold it off to Access Co, who appears to have done nothing with it.
- mikecane 14y agoHang on. That's not true. At one time the ELSE phone was hyped. http://youtu.be/M4sVGR5uRhc http://youtu.be/M4sVGR5uRhc It went nowhere, but at least it was something at one time.
- bambax 14y agoThe saddest video I've seen in a long time ;-)
- mcbridematt 14y agoSimilarly the BeOS platform morphed into Palm OS 6 (Cobalt), which only ever appeared in sample quantities from a phone OEM. (This was well after Palm spun off their OS business, but before PalmSource was acquired by ACCESS)
- unwiredben 14y ago...and then technology from Palm OS Cobalt, the Binder, migrated with engineers from that team to become part of the low-level system interface in Android.
- darklajid 14y agoThe thing I liked most about WebOS? Gestures and its card system. I cannot imagine how that translates to a TV.
- SquareWheel 14y agoPerhaps a remote with a touch pad for gestures?
- dade_ 14y agoI ran into a company that has created software that allows 3D gesture sensing with inexpensive IR devices. It would seem to be perfect for this use. WebOS with gestures is a lot more intuitive than any of the remotes on my coffee table. http://www.gesturesense.com/products/6dof http://www.gesturesense.com/products/6dof
- rahoulb 14y agoLeap interface? https://www.leapmotion.com/ https://www.leapmotion.com/
- geon 14y agoI have difficult to see what advantage webOS has on a TV. With no touch (?) they need to completely redesign the interface anyway.
- ansible 14y agoThe could pair it with a Kinect style gesture interface. Sigh. I really find TVs with enhanced features that useful. The problem is that the software goes out of date very quickly, and I am entirely dependent on the TV manufacturer for updates, which will likely stop shortly after the TV goes out of production (which is what, 6 months these days). All I really want out of a TV is good picture quality, and a bunch of input ports. For video streaming, gaming, and other apps, I prefer to have a separate box for that, which can be replaced and/or upgraded less expensively.
- Indyan 14y agoYeah. LG's high end smart TVs have something called Magic Remote. It's no kinect, but an improved version of this might work well with an WebOS adapted for the big screen. http://www.lg.com/global/magicremote/ http://www.lg.com/global/magicremote/
- baddox 14y agoI have one and it's awful. For one thing, if you have it sitting somewhere on your couch, any time someone else moves on the couch, a cursor will appear on the screen for 10 seconds or so because the remote will detect movement.
- moondowner 14y agoHow this affects the Enyo and Open webOS projects? Is it affecting them at all?
- Mahn 14y agoI was wondering the exact same thing. I guess it's very likely LG abandons the open version of it though.
- unwiredben 14y agoBoth the HP and LG press releases say "LG will assume stewardship of the open source projects of Open WebOS and Enyo." I'm the Enyo tech lead and I've got an offer from LG.
- moondowner 14y agoHope you guys continue the good work! :)
- mixedbit 14y agoI wonder if any attempt at reinventing TV will achieve a mainstream success (I mean a legacy TV scale success). Up until today all such attempts attracted a relatively small group of customers and a popular opinion is that TV is bound to die.
- Mahn 14y agoMaybe because early adopters don't care for TVs. I'd be willing to bet most folks here in HN don't really watch TV for instance, other than for the occasional news, and for something to eventually catch on and become mainstream having a base of early adopters helps. Perhaps I'm just assuming things, but I feel like this will be a major block on the road to everyone building "smart" TVs.
- jackalope 14y agoI think group watching will remain popular, especially among kids, and for that you need a large display. Maybe the trend will be towards screen sharing, where you'd use a tablet or phone to select programming, then switch it to the screen. Maybe 'screen control' would be a more apt name, since I wouldn't want to depend on the tablet/phone for data & rendering. I'm not convinced that enormous standalone tablets are sufficient, because I have to believe that fingerprint smudges on a TV would be seriously distracting.
- mixedbit 14y agoYes, people for sure will still want to watch stuff on good quality displays. But I think dump TVs: large displays that you can easily connect to a standard computer or a mobile device and stream content to are much more compelling than 'smart' platforms.
- PostOnce 14y agoYou can plug computers into the HDMI port of any new TV already, right? Whats the difference between a TV and a large display, for the purposes of the average consumer?
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoThis just signals that there is a hole in the market for an open source smart TV platform. Google TV was supposed to be that, but it's pretty clear that they don't take it as seriously as they take Android. To manufacturers like LG, TVs are actually more important, and falling behind competitors is more serious. Forking Android for this purpose isn't really an option thanks to the recent "non-fragmentation agreement" all of the phone manufacturers were forced to sign. So they are going to try and go down the proprietary route. They'll likely fail, but we'll see.
- koralatov 14y agoThis just signals that there is a hole in the market for an open source smart TV platform. Is there, though? I'm pretty technical, and very interested in the whole FLOSS thing, and I'm pretty much of the `meh' contingent when it comes my TV's software's licensing. All I really care about is turning the damn thing on, watching what I want, when I want, and being able to afford to rent the stuff I want to watch. Now take that disinterest in the licensing and `openness' of a TV's software, multiply it several times, and you get close to the amount most non-technical people care about the software their TV runs. I've worked with non-technical people long enough to know that they care about getting done what they want to do, easily, more than almost anything else when it comes to software. That attitude may be short-sighted, but it's very much the standard; all they want from a TV is the ability to watch $PROGRAMME with as little pain and inconvenience as possible. Caring about the philosophy of the software a TV runs is very much a `nerd' past-time, and that's not likely to change soon.
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoI think you missed my point. That consumers only care about their programming being available is precisely why an open platform is needed. If LG releases a smart TV that doesn't have Netflix, Hulu, MLB.tv, Amazon, etc. they look bad in the eye of the consumer. Those content providers are currently building out separate apps for each TV platform, or at least for the ones big enough to move the needle.
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- thiagoperes 14y agoNot using WebOS on smartphones is really a waste. Palm failed but I still think it was an OS ahead of its time.
- DeepDuh 14y agoSometimes 'ahead of its time' is not such a good thing. Specifically, when the available hardware can't keep up with what the system design demands[1], e.g. a responsive smartphone touch interface created in an interpreter (as far as I can see without even having a JIT compiler) on a 500Mhz embedded CPU, without GPU acceleration[2]. It was ahead of its time alright. [1]http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/01/02/0213204/insiders-call-hps-webos-software-fatally-flawed http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/01/02/0213204/insiders... [2]http://forums.webosnation.com/webos-discussion-lounge/295123-webos-devices-gpu-acceleration.html http://forums.webosnation.com/webos-discussion-lounge/295123...
- onli 14y agoSure, running too taxing software on unaccelerated hardware is a bad thing. But webOS wasn't slow. It had sporadic slowdown and then it really was slow, but in normal state it sure could compete speedwise. It was buggy, the scrolling felt slow because the settings were wrong (as proven by the buttah-patch), same for the animations, the default-browser lacks html5-support, the connectivity of the phones is bad, pages often don't load without a reason even when on wlan (and when not, it often fails to fetch a slowly loading page bit for bit, which was made even worse because the browser would reload that page the moment it was loaded because he was inactive too long(!)) - it wasn't performance that was the issue here. So maybe LG really can take the system and make something out of it. The tile-system sure could work on TVs designed to be used with a remote-touchpad-controller.
- happycube 14y agoMercer is a bit... biased. He was pushing a debased Java system that took five lines of code to center text, and couldn't implement Duarte's ideas properly. So webOS becoming, well, webOS was in reaction to that and a rushed effort to come up with something else in time for CES 2009. The Palm folks then spent too many months de-Mercerizing the code for webOS 2.0...
- lucasjans 14y agoSince no one has posted this... CNET has pulled the article which was the only source of this deal. I'm guessing it was a hoax. We'll find out soon, I'm sure.
- Shooti 14y agoAccording to Business Insider they broke an embargo: http://www.businessinsider.com/hang-oncnet-just-pulled-this-mornings-big-news-about-hewlett-packard-and-lg-2013-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/hang-oncnet-just-pulled-this-...
- onli 14y agoIf LG uses its new ownership to pay one developer to release the update that was promised and in the pipeline for the HP Veer, but was never released (rumor was they simply forgot to switch a button), I promise my next TV will be a LG.
- pinaceae 14y agothis tweet by Kontra sums it up: WebOS has been targeted to mini-phones, larger smartphones, tablets, printers & now TVs. Won't stop until you see it on a LG refrigerator. https://twitter.com/counternotions/status/306014344876023808 https://twitter.com/counternotions/status/306014344876023808
- emehrkay 14y agoImagine a situation where you'a query your fridge from the market and it tells you that you're low on milk or have 8 eggs so no need to get more.
- pessimizer 14y agoOr when the people who made your fridge query it without your knowledge, then sell the current state to 3rd parties who make sure that all you see are egg ads on the internet.
- emehrkay 14y agoYeah. That's what sucks about technology. So much cool innovation, but it is ultimately used against you, or the misuses are forced down your throat until you're okay with it.
- mattquiros 14y agoBut of all the hardware makers, LG? They make ugly products. Innovation is not really in their DNA. I wonder where this is going.
- jzwinck 14y agoUgly is in the eye of the beholder, but LG moves a ton of product, and could put WebOS somewhere it has never been so far: in the hands and homes of millions of consumers. The real question is whether the UX will be beautiful on TVs with remote controls. It was on the Pre, but that's nothing similar.
- Indyan 14y agoLG's 3D TV range is actually quite good. The Cinema3D series of smart TVs have a lot going for them including great display, beautiful elegant design, and an intuitive remote.
- r4vik 14y agoNexus 4 is ugly?
- penisremover 14y agoclitoris removal
- CaveTech 14y agoDefinitely not at the cutting edge of phone design either.
- mattquiros 14y agoI have a Nexus 4 and it's beautiful. I love it. But I don't really consider it an "LG" phone because look at how strikingly different it is from their other models. It seems that because they carried the Nexus brand, they had to follow the Galaxy Nexus' design, which might be a standard for Nexus phones now. I wouldn't be surprised if the next Nexus phone looked the same.
- whalesalad 14y agoIt's like the village bicycle. Everyone is taking it for a ride. The idea behind WebOS and some of it's UI held were pretty awesome. Unfortunately it's got way too much baggage now. I think Firefox OS has the best chance to do what WebOS could have done.
- programminggeek 14y agoSo far there are two main use cases for smart TV's - watching videos, and games. Up until now "smart TV's" are bundled with mediocre to terrible video apps, and don't come with game controllers or game apps. At this point something like Roku or OUYA is a lot closer to the future of TV than even Google TV, which for reasons I'll never understand doesn't seem to even understand the basic use cases of smart TV - video and games. I don't see how webOS gets LG any closer to what people want from a smart tv.