By HP made it clear that webOS was a thing of its past. The mobile operating system was short-lived under the control of HP, but that doesn’t mean it’s lost its value. HP has sold the rights to webOS to LG for an undisclosed amount, according to Reuters. The first question we had was “what does this mean for LG’s smartphone business?” Well, nothing quite yet.
It seems LG is actually looking to use webOS to deliver a unique TV experience. We’re not sure how the fabled operating system will stretch to bigger screens, but LG will have a long road ahead if it wants to resurrect webOS in a meaningful way. It’s unclear what this means for the future of Google TV under LG’s banner. LG has been one of the biggest proponents of the Android-based TV experience, stuffing the experience into a sizable portion of its smart TV line-up.
Some might say this gives us reason to be worried about the future of Google TV. If LG’s desire to use webOS has spawned from its inability to properly market the enhancements Google TV and leverage the technology to sell televisions it makes us wonder how many more major manufacturers feel this way.
Perhaps we’re just looking a bit too deep into this and LG simply wants to make sure its portfolio stays diversified. Whatever the case may be, we just hope LG doesn’t lose faith in Android and begin to go all in with webOS — we’ve started warming up quite nicely to its Optimus line as of late. We’re sure there’s nothing to worry about in that regard, but we have no choice but to keep the possibility of LG dropping out of the Android arms race in the back of our minds from this point forward.
[via Reuters]
Google needs to release its own nexus hardware for tv, but something attractive and desirable. LG has one of the better looking versions of GTV I’ve seen. I also thnk they have bigger plans for Web os than tv. Eveyone wants their own piece of the put
webOS was a fantastic operating system. Palm’s big mistake was making it proprietary. If Palm had made it open source (like HP did) then I truly believe webOS would be competing with iOS and Android to this day. webOS was *that* good.
I miss webos. I wish I could flash it to my GS3.
I would imagine the webOS interface on a TV would look a whole lot like Roku’s current TV interface.
You aren’t looking too deep, I agree with you. I don’t get it. This could be done so much better but Google fails to do it. It’s obviously not a priority for them.
Throw away what your talking about with TV for a second. What if Google was going to make Key Lime more proprietary and not provide the entire code as open source? If so, this might be a good move for LG strategically to begin their own open source OS.
Do you actually think Google will do that? That would be completely ass-backwards of them and makes no sense whatsoever.
Yes. It makes sense to me. Samsung,and others, add features that are not open source, but are on the Android open source system. why wouldn’t Google create some Nexus device specific functionality? Then, they can call it Motorola specific functionality. Since LG made the last Nexus phone, I will bet they know something is coming as they would already be a part of testing with Key Lime Pie since its release is probably only 3 months away in May.
stick with android, your better off
I suspect WebOS will be integrated into TV’s while Lg will still sell GTV set-top boxes when it sees a version of GTV that they believe is marketable.