LG purchased the rights to webOS from HP to reportedly use it in its latest smart TV. An image has leaked showing a new LG television running LG's webOS remix.
Here's a quick run down to get you to caught up with webOS. In the early smartphone days Palm was the market leader and in many ways was the "Apple" of smartphones. It offered users a very easy to understand a touch UI-based smartphone operating system that was simple and yet very intuitive. It went head to head with the legions of Microsoft Pocket PC and Windows Mobile licensees like Samsung, HTC, Sony and LG, just to name a few. All of those vendors are still around, while Palm faced a short lived 'comeback kid' story thanks to webOS, only to see its demise when HP purchased the smartphone maker and its slick mobile OS, killing the entire webOS market just days after the company launched its iPad rival, the TouchPad.
Palm was on its last leg with Palm OS, since the OS was never originally intended to be pushed from being an organizer to the lengths it was able to achieve with Palm OS 5 Garnet (ran on Treo 650, 700p, and 755p). Palm had been secretly working on a smartphone operating system it built using web standards, making it easy for developers to easily create apps for the OS, while also keeping what many of Palm's faithful users expected from the company: deliver all of of it in an intuitive package. Palm had scheduled an event at CES 2009 where it would show off the new webOS mobile operating system it had developed and also the company's first device to run webOS, the Palm Pre. The company surprised the tech world and won many awards at the show for webOS and the Palm Pre. Many viewed it as the first real threat to the iPhone.
Palm never saw the success it hoped with webOS and was forced to sell the company to HP in 2010. HP instantly became a smartphone and tablet player, but days after it launched its first webOS tablet, the HP TouchPad, it announced it was killing off webOS. Now, webOS fans will be happy to know that LG will be showing off its webOS smart TV at CES. We're getting our first glimpse at LG's webOS smart TV, thanks to the always-reliable evleaks.
The image shows a very thin and gorgeous LG television and the familiar webOS Card View, similar to what Apple uses as its multitasking feature in iOS 7 (complete with flick off the screen to close an app). It will be interesting to see what other changes LG has made to webOS. The image also shows that LG plans on having a bunch of popular apps available, including LG's SmartShare, which allows you to send photos, music, and videos from a mobile device to the TV, Facebook, YouTube, Skype, Twitter and more.
We'll be bringing you a ton of CES news very soon, so stay tuned.
