Palm Finally Introduces a new OS

Today Palm revealed news at CES that it had finally completed its latest operating system; and I have to say I’m excited.

The new operating system is called Palm WebOS.  Somewhat predictably this operating system is designed to be really easy for web developers to design applications for.  If you happen to know X/HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you can create applications for this new operating system.

What this means for the mobile market, is that right out of the gate there are potentially millions of developers available for this system with all the knowhow required to get an application up an running in as little as 3 days.

What’s even more exiciting is the user experience design for this new operating system.  Palm has created a device that’s really open to developers while at the same time being fairly sophisticated in its ability to seamlessly integrate information from several sources simultaneously without duplications.  This means that your contact list from outlook, gmail, hotmail, yahoo, etc.  can all be integrated on the same device without any hiccups or format incompatibility issues.  In short, I think they’ve acheived what google was trying to do with Android, except Palm seems to have pulled it off with a whole lot more class than the Big G.

That being said, I still have some concerns over the application interface being web based.  To me this seems like an opportunity for people to develop self installing applications of a malicious nature through link hijacking and the like.  I really hope Palm has thought far enough into the future to prevent these possibilities from coming to reality.

I think Palm deserves a Kudos from the tech community for sticking it out so long and innovating in a market that seemed to have all the angles covered (or at least have people with patents that claim to cover the area Palm has ventured into).  On that note, let the lawsuits begin.  I suspect there will be some litigation in the near future.

Congratulations Palm!

Cheers,

Tarandon