Third time’s a charm? HP CEO Meg Whitman believes that webOS can still triumph over the “fragmented” Android and the “closed” iOS but she remained vague about what role the platform will play for HP moving forward. WebOS’ story is one of unfulfilled potential, as it debuted with Palm a few years ago during CES with a lot of fanfare. It launched with the Palm Pre but couldn’t really carve out a significant market share against the iPhone 3G and Android. HP purchased Palm for $1.2 billion, released a few … Read more

Former Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein is leaving HP and he leaves a tantalizing legacy of unfulfilled potential with webOS. Rubinstein said he’s going to take a “well deserved break” for a while but I wouldn’t be surprised to see him pop up at another major mobile company in the not-too-distant future (Microsoft could use him). Rubinstein came from Apple and tried to remake Palm with webOS but even the nicest 1.0 smartphone platform design in the world couldn’t save Palm and webOS from death. You can read the full story … Read more

HP announced on Wednesday that, starting today, it’s making part of webOS available to the open source community. Each month, HP will release major portions of webOS, a few  pieces at a time, until the entire code base is made public. HP expects to release the full code base by September and is calling the final release Open webOS 1.0. You can see the release schedule at the bottom of this post. The first component that’ll be made available to the public is Enyo 2.0, HP’s development tool for webOS. Enyo is available now for download from HP’s new Enyo website or github. HP’s trying hard to get developer support and is releasing Enyo with … Read more

By now, we all know the sad story of webOS and how it has one last, slim chance at being successful but that’s not stopping former Palm and HP employees from discussing what went wrong with the innovative platform. Not surprisingly, we have multiple accounts which place the blame on different things. The New York Times spoke with former Palm senior director of software Paul Mercer and he said webOS was just too early and didn’t have the right execution. “Palm was ahead of its time in trying to build … Read more

According to Venture Beat, HP tried to sell webOS and Palm, but couldn’t find a buyer willing to pay HP’s exorbitant asking price of $1.2 billion. HP apparently wanted to reduce its losses by selling Palm at the same price it paid for the company back in 2010. This value might be reasonable if HP actually did something to improve the platform, but, sadly, the company failed to do anything significant with webOS. HP released the Pre 3 and the Veer, two lackluster handsets that failed to excite consumers. The … Read more

After months of webOS twisting in the wind, HP has reportedly finalized its plans for the elegant mobile operating system. HP will keep webOS but submit it to an open source community so that other handset makers and tinkerers can use it. In a press release, HP said its goals for the open source move include: The goal of the project is to accelerate the open development of the webOS platform HP will be an active participant and investor in the project Good, transparent and inclusive governance to avoid fragmentation … Read more

HP CEO Meg Whitman said a final decision will be made on what the company will do with webOS within the next two weeks. This won’t be like the last time she said they’ll make a decision on webOS, I’m guessing. Asked by a French newspaper about when the company will make a decision on the mobile platform, Whitman reportedly said, “We should announce our decision in the next two weeks. This is not an easy decision, because we have a team of 600 people which is in limbo. We … Read more