Palm's abandoned webOS plans at HP included phones and tablets, major UI evolution
The lost secrets of webOS — LG is about to unveil the future of webOS — but there's a past we never saw — Next week, LG will unveil new televisions running webOS, the ill-fated operating system it acquired in last February.
Context & Ripple Effects
webOS has been an orphan twice over: Palm's well-reviewed webOS 2.0 never found hardware traction, and HP's attempt to open-source the platform stalled at the Open WebOS beta it released in August 2012. The February 2013 sale to LG — where LG declined to rule out a phone — was the first sign the code would outlive its makers.
This report fills in what died along the way: HP had planned new phones, tablets, and a major UI evolution before scrapping them, leaving LG's television push — previewed in last week's leaked webOS TV image and set for unveiling next week — as the platform's only confirmed future.
First-order effects
- HP's exit is now total: the abandoned phone and tablet roadmap means the company that bought Palm for webOS has no remaining consumer-hardware plans for the OS it once bet on.
- LG becomes webOS's sole steward, and next week's TV launch will be judged against the UI evolution HP designed but never shipped.
Second-order effects
- Having said in 2013 that a phone wasn't off the table, LG inherits HP's discarded handset and tablet designs as raw material if it ever revives webOS beyond the living room.
- Rival TV makers pushing their own smart-TV stacks face a competitor whose OS carries Palm-era brand goodwill and a decade of touch-interface design at no acquisition premium.
Third-order effects
- If the LG TV launch lands well, webOS joins the growing set of failed phone platforms finding second lives in appliances — suggesting the value of a mobile OS increasingly lies in its interface patents and code, not its app ecosystem.
- For HP, the collapse of both the hardware roadmap and the open-source route marks the end of the buyer-as-platform-savior model that Palm hoped for in 2010.
The trend: Orphaned smartphone operating systems are being resold and rehomed in televisions and appliances, where their touch-first interfaces outlive the handsets they were built for.