intelliLinux A blog about Innovation and Information

On June 6th 2009, Palm released their first smart phone featuring a non-Microsoft OS to support true multitasking. That all by itself isn't such a huge deal even though stalwart Palm fans have wanted that exact feature for years.

The real news is that it's new operating system, WebOS, is totally Linux based and appears to be significantly more open than Google's Android or certainly the bsd based OSX variant used on the iPhone. Even better for Palm and it's fans, WebOS has a feature base and attractiveness that even the iPhone's OS can't best. Compete with, yes. Get the better of, no (at least according to most of the reviews i've read).

Now, I must admit some bias because I have been a fan of Linux and it's usage since mid-2002. That said, I'm not particularly impressed with Android. WebOS is much slicker, and in my opinion the differences in openness are stark. I will be looking at webOS as it stands, not in comparison to anything else.

In this spirit, I have talked with some of the hackers currently working away on the Prē through #webos-internals on Freenode, and i'm very impressed with the device's OS and what has already been discovered less than two weeks out.