What’s a new phone without a new operating system? Palm has wisely realised this with the launch of the Palm pre, offering up a brand new open source operating system for it, webOS – get details and all the webOS pictures after the jump!
Palm’s emphasis with webOS is to bring all of your online information “all together in a really seamless way, integrated automatically”, according to the company’s CEO, Ed Colligan. We haven’t had a play yet, but from the demo we saw at the keynote, it does just that, compiling every form of internet account. We don’t have precise lists but Facebook, Google Talk and Outlook are definites, and you’d expect Skype and Twitter as well.
Done before, yes, but webOS looks to improve on the INQ1‘s software by offering silent messaging scrolling across the bottom of the screen so you’re not snowed under with status changes and alerts every hour of the day.
We love the slick, gliding interface and multiple programs task bar (Colligan called it a “Deck of cards”), but best of all though is that webOS is completely open source. “If you can use HTML, CSS or Java, you can develop for it,” said Colligan.
There’s no information about when code will be made available, or if any App Store or Android Market style platform is in the works, but given Palm’s huge back catalogue of third party apps on previous OSs, you can bet we’ll be keeping a close eye on this one.
Out TBC | £TBC | Palm
