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0 pointshajile6y ago0 comments

Web-based seems to make a lot of sense. Something like 90% of all apps in both the Apple and Google store are already web apps. WASM makes this idea even more appealing.

webOS in 2009 isn't even a comparison for a few important reasons.

* They were primarily RAM restricted at only 256mb.

* The then new v8 engine was about 4x slower than the current iteration (not to mention using much more RAM). Webkit is also much, much faster today

* They used QtWebkit -- a slow and grossly outdated version of webkit that offered bad performance even back then.

* There team seemed to have zero experience in actually using and optimizing a Linux OS.

A single-core 1GHz A5 chip was a crazy idea. The ZTE Open C came out 6 months later *at the same price8 and had a better screen (480x800 instead of 320x480), twice the RAM (512mb instead of 256mb), and probably close to 4x the CPU power (2x A7@1.2GHz instead of 1x A5@1GHz -- for reference, AMD runs an A5 as their security coprocessor on their x86 chips).

The ZTE Open was simply a mistake. It would have been a mistake no matter the OS or native vs web apps.

0 comments

badsectoracula6y ago

ZTE Open ran Firefox OS, not webOS. Though my point was that a much older an MUCH weaker ARM-based phone that didn't try to pretend the web is a platform but instead used native code managed to both outperform and be a much more usable device.

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