Much as were knocked out by Palm’s superb multi-tasking webOS, the very limited selection of phones available and the the long list of feature omissions meant that it failed to become our ‘go to’ handset.
HP on the case
Happily, it seems that new owners HP are set on moving things forward, and the fellas at PreCentral.net have done some fiddling about with a Palm Pre 2 running webOS 2.0 and unearthed the code for a built in on-screen keyboard.
Although it’s clearly still unfinished – it’s described as “a little buggy” – it points to a new generation of HP/Palm full-touchscreen devices ready to improve on the ageing Palm Pre and Pixi models.
Gesture powered
In the video, the real keypad has to be used to activate the virtual one, but after some further rummaging around in the code, the PreCentral gang worked out that it could be activated by the “Quick Wave” gesture.
This means that users can pull up the keyboard with a finger swipe in the gesture area, which seems a neat way of doing things.
No future?
Although it’s great to see HP actively developing the platform, we can’t help feeling it’s going to take some sort of minor miracle to spark any long term life into webOS’s fortunes.
With the iPhone and Android platforms thoroughly established, Blackberry still hanging on tight to its (slipping) market share and Windows Phone 7 making a strong début, we can’t see much space for Palm to make an impact.
