For the last couple of days, I’ve been testing the HP Pre 3, putting it through the usual rigorous treadmill of testing we do here. Then last night, HP canned the platform it runs, webOS, essentially pulling the plug on a phone that was barely on sale: for while I’ve always said you should never buy a phone based on what it might do in the future, there’s no point buying a smartphone with no future.
As adequate as the hardware is, and as superb as the operating system, I can’t honestly score this phone given that even its manufacturer is washing its hands of it.
Even Nokia’s long-in-the-tooth smartphone OS, Symbian, which was effectively killed off in February with Nokia’s defection to Windows Phone, lingers on. Nokia has just released a new update for it, Anna, and a follow up, Belle, appears to be on the way soon – meanwhile, it’s outsourced updates to Accenture, and is still busily plugging new Symbian phones in blockbuster movies (see the X7 in Transformers 3).
HP’s move is a crying shame, because webOS never deserved this fate. While the sliding Palm form factor became tired a long time ago, quite frankly, in some areas, no other mobile players have come even remotely close to matching webOS. Its card-based multi-tasking is still light years ahead of anything Apple, Google, RIM or Microsoft has to offer – it sounds silly, but treating every open web page, settings menu or game as an individual app was a stroke of utter genius.
Likewise the inobtrusive notification system was years ahead of rivals. Apple’s new notification system that doesn’t get all up in your face every time you get a text or a calendar event still isn’t available to Joe Public, and Microsoft’s cross-platform chat feature in Mango was pioneered by the first Palm Pre two years ago.
But what good is that when there are no apps? While a Pay As You Go Palm Pixi Plus might still be a worthy buy if all you want is a cheap messaging phone (and not a smartphone), there’s no justification for an expensive phone like the HP Pre 3 when it does precisely squat. Even Angry Birds looks dreadful on it – because Rovio isn’t bothered about updating it for the new screen resolution.
After the initial shock reaction and tombstone epitaphs by the media, a few sources have come forward to suggest that webOS may well live on, and that HP really is hoping to license it out to another OEM: that the mediocre hardware was the problem.
That may be true, but if so, HP has handled it spectacularly badly: why even drop the slightest hint publicly without first finding a buyer or licensee? Before, I could see how HTC might just be interested: it clearly has ambitions to exclusivity, given its attempts to encourage HTC Sense only apps for its Android phones.
Now every lingering webOS developer will have packed up and left. What’s the point in paying money to leverage a platform with no future?
There’s only one way out I could see that could feasibly work: RIM would need to buy webOS, drop QNX development, and work as hard as Nokia has this year to deliver a new phone on a new platform within twelve months. I have here a BlackBerry Bold 9900 on my desk, a luscious metal slab with a stunning keyboard. But BlackBerry 7 is garbage: with webOS onboard though it could be quite special. It won’t happen: RIM is far too proud, and far too inert.
Instead, a three star phone has been turned into a paperweight overnight. Sure, it’s a paperweight that plays Flash video, but well, why do you need a paperweight that does that?
Farewell, webOS, we hardly knew ye.
Thanks to Clove for the HP Pre 3 review unit – it’s still on sale here, if you really want one.
