Everyone knows Apple’s approach to their OS is proprietary. Even though Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 7 OS is freely licensable, it is fully controlled by Microsoft. And now that Google has bought Motorola, Android is looking more and more like it could become more tightly controlled as part of a vertically integrated offering. Unless HP quickly states that webOS will not only be licensable but also truly open (which I don’t think they will ever do), then I believe that there is serious room for a completely new mobile OS to emerge and especially give handset vendors targeting emerging markets an OS of their own to work with.
Not a lot of choices for handset makers that would allow them to compete with Apple.
If you think about it, iOS started way back when with NEXT and the NEXT OS, then OS X, then iOS.
If Steve Jobs and Apple did it, why can’t someone else make a similar effort?
Too much effort? Then quit complaining!
iOS is Mach with both a Cocoa and a WebKit GUI Later, It’s like the combination of Chrome OS and Android done right, able to do web apps as natively as WebOS, but also with support for native Cocoa Apps too.
WebOS is/was Linux with a WebKit GUI Layer and a javascript-based Backend. It is/was more *Web* that ChromeOS. It could support ported Apps as Web Plugins.
Windows Phone 7 is Windows CE with a IE GUI Layer and a .Net backend. It is not quite as *Web* as Chrome OS.
Android is Linux with a Jalvik (read “bootleg Java”) VM. It is as antithetical to Chrome as you can get.It has more in common with obsolete legacy Smartphone OS’s like Symbian and BlackberryOS.
Any new OS would need to be progressive enough to support Web Apps Natively as well as having a full featured efficient Native API, like Cocoa or .Net.
It would also need a killer feature like WebOS’s Synergy or RIM’s BBM in order to make any headway against iOS.
Yeah. Maybe they can make a mobile Ubuntu. That’ll catch on.
Bajarin gets the “I do not get it” award of the day. (HP got it for the year!)
I would really like a mobile OS that comes out and kicks ass not something a company blows their wad too early in announcing but they just shut up and ship.
They look at all the awesome parts of every mobile OS and build it out and don’t release it until it’s fully baked and ready to compete in the current market it’s a big task but there are companies out there who could pull it off. There’s too much half baked bullshit out there.
A pipe dream yes but a nice one….
There is another choice. I worked on Linux phones for years. Although cheap and open, no one wants to buy them because they don’t do anything interesting without some controlling interest to put forth some value; thus most vendors rolled them in to android.
Open software does not a product make.