# Pre to postmortem: the inside story of the death of Palm and webOS



## Kid_Eternity (Jun 5, 2012)

Good piece about Palm and its downfall...few phones I've owned have been as cool as my Palm Centro.



> Thirty-one.
> 
> That’s the number of months it took Palm, Inc. to go from the darling of International CES 2009 to a mere shadow of itself, a nearly anonymous division inside the HP machine without a hardware program and without the confidence of its owners. Thirty-one months is just barely longer than a typical American mobile phone contract.
> 
> ...


 
Read the full article.


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## editor (Jun 5, 2012)

A Commodore-sized fuckup and a loss to consumers too.


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## Kid_Eternity (Jun 5, 2012)

Yep...WebOS could have been amazing in how it shaped smartphone UX...


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## pinkmonkey (Jun 5, 2012)

WebOs was ace (mourns stolen touchpad)


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## editor (Jun 5, 2012)

I've still got a Palm Pre. It's still the best mobile OS I've ever used. Shame the phone hasn't aged so well.


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## Kid_Eternity (Jun 5, 2012)

A mate of mine had one in active use until about a year ago, still complains about his current smartphone being nowhere near as good.


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## salem (Jun 6, 2012)

Interesting article and instantly brought to mind a similar round up of where Nokia had gone wrong - similar company politics, change of directions etc with Meamo/Meego/Symbian/W7 etc.

I think perhaps the key point though was that Palm and HP didn't make a logical fit and the staff member who mentioned Windows having to spend billions to get into 3rd place in the smartphone market probably had a good point. It would have been a huge gamble for HP - it would have taken a lot for them to pull it off.


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## Piers Gibbon (Jun 7, 2012)

I remember my Palm Treo 650 and Palm Centro very fondly...and there are still things that I cannot do on my iPhone even now. They both had the simplest of settings whereby you could download just the sender and subject line of an email and then decide whether or not to download the rest of it (great when roaming)

But I am very happy that I got an iphone rather than the Palm Pre...I dithered for ages about that


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## editor (Jun 7, 2012)

Treo 650 is still the best phone I've ever had.

(*for its time etc)


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## Kid_Eternity (Jun 7, 2012)

Piers Gibbon said:


> I remember my Palm Treo 650 and Palm Centro very fondly...and there are still things that I cannot do on my iPhone even now. They both had the simplest of settings whereby you could download just the sender and subject line of an email and then decide whether or not to download the rest of it (great when roaming)
> 
> But I am very happy that I got an iphone rather than the Palm Pre...I dithered for ages about that



Yup loved my Centro! Nothing had come close to Agendus on it for me...


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## elbows (Jun 7, 2012)

Sadly survival doesn't have that much to do with having some really nicely designed stuff in the past, and an operating system that its fans think is wonderful. Its hard to say that WebOS was a brilliant system since many criteria for what makes a decent OS were never tested really, it never got a chance for developers to see what they could get out of it, or to see how it evolved in response to early flaws, or how effectively it could utilise a range of hardware, etc. People that are big fans of it are really fans of certain aspects of its user interface, which is completely fair enough, but not the same as the OS being superb.

Even if a company can eliminate stupid bickering and awful decisions, I think in most cases its hard to stay top of most tech sectors for long. When someone else comes along and disrupts your market, and does some things that its not so trivial to imitate because the new competitor has had their fingers in other pies for so long, pies you've barely ever smelt let alone cooked up yourself, its going to be hard not to end up toast.


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## UnderAnOpenSky (Dec 31, 2013)

Looks like LG will be sticking it on it's TVs.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/30/lg_webos_tv_to_debut_at_ces/


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## Kid_Eternity (Jan 6, 2014)

Yep...but don't think they'll bother doing the same with their phones...


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