Wednesday, September 18, 2013

WebOS and Nokia - I wish

A mobile phone's hardware specifications are important but in today's world its the software (the Operating System) that dictates the user experience. Most high end phones today, from HTC, Motorolla, Samsung, Apple, Nokia and others, have almost the same hardware specs, with little or no differences. What distinguishes them from each other is the software on top of the hardware. And because of that Motorola, Samsung and HTC are no different for me. They try to give an illusion of uniqueness by making their own UI on top of Android but it does not effect most parts of my user experience.

Because of this, I have always been against Nokia making an Android handset. I have always thought that Nokia would be better off maintaining their unique identity. If they started making Android handsets they would be just another handset manufacturer in a long list of companies including Samsung, HTC, Motorolla, Huawei and many other Chinese and Korean and other handset manufacturers. But that would be a disgrace, I mean its Nokia which was once synonymous with mobile phone.

WebOS was the operating system on Palm Pre hand sets. I never got a chance to use WebOS but I have seen a lot of screen shots and read a lot of reviews when it came out and I was very excited about Palm Pre but unfortunately it never came to my country. The reviews for Palm Pre were good but what all the reviewers really liked and were talking about was its operating system i.e WebOS. So when HP bought Palm and later closed it altogether, I wished that Nokia would buy all the rights to WebOS and use it as the main operating system for their handsets. This way they would get a really great mobile operating system which would complement their existing handsets like Lumia nicely and could easily compete with the likes of Android and iOS.


I still wish Nokia would do this but I do not think this is going to happen now, with Nokia now being part of Microsoft and all, but the heart wants what the heart wants :)

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