The smartphone world may be dominated by Android, iOS and Windows Phone at the minute, but it wasn’t always that way. There was a time when webOS was around and was deemed to be probably one of the best and most accomplished mobile operating systems available to users. Unfortunately, those days are long gone, and when HP acquired the software from Palm, its end was somewhat inevitable. Let’s not try to get sad over the long gone days, and all is not lost, since the source code of webOS is now available for all to have and consume.
There was some chatter not that long ago about webOS being ported over to work on the Galaxy Nexus, with that quickly being followed up with the team involved releasing the source code into the open-source community for all to take advantage of. The Open webOS code has been available for the community to enjoy and pick at for just over a week, but this release of the source code of the Galaxy Nexus port of webOS has taken quite a few people by surprise who didn’t expect it to be publicly released so soon.
Apart from the Galaxy Nexus, we have already seen the Open webOS software successfully booting onto the Transformer Prime device, something that perfectly showcases the hard work of the open-source community and the wide spread affection that exists for HP’s firmware. The release of the source code online doesn’t automatically mean that everything is working fine without any issues and there are still a number of bugs and kinks that need to be worked out before webOS is running smoothly and flawlessly on additional hardware.
The development team in question have already publicly discussed issues surrounding video acceleration of the port, as well as pretty big parts that are missing; such as Bluetooth and on-board camera functionality. With that said, the release of the software into the community clearly shows that progress is being made at a sufficient enough rate to warrant releasing the code to the masses. Now that this first release has hit the airwaves, it won’t be long until we are being inundated with updates regarding the progress of Open webOS ports.
(Via XDADevelopers)
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