A little while ago I laid out what I believe Palm should do with their next phone. Since then Sprint has announced the HTC Evo 4G and I’m seriously considering getting it when my year with the Pre is up. Here is what Palm should do with WebOS as a platform, not just as a phone OS.
I believe the biggest thing holding WebOS back now is the hardware. The hardware is limited to phones right now, is a year and a half old and is badly in need of a refresh. Seeing as how the iPad is coming out this weekend, I have naturally been thinking about the tablet form factor in general. I’m not a big fan of the iPad (obviously), but I believe the form factor has alot going for it and for the right features and price I would be all over it.
WebOS excels at it’s purpose, being a finger-friendly, multi-touch, multitasking operating system. This would translate perfectly over to a tablet form factor. Taking the iPad’s form factor, which is almost without flaw, Palm could make the software match the hardware for beauty and usability. Enable a ‘touch bar’ around the entire border of the display. Allow developers to enable or disable portions of the touch bar to enable different hand positions on the device. Just like on the Palm Pre, having a gesture area that is not on the screen can be very useful and add valuable real estate to the device.
Also, and this is a big one, add a camera! It appears that even Apple had a camera in the iPad but was removed before it’s debut for some unknown reason. Adding a front-facing camera enables native Skype calling, picture/video capture and a new interactive level to games. This ran a close second to being the biggest reason why I don’t want to get an iPad(yet).
Update WebOS to be able to operate like Google’s Chrome OS by saving all your documents to the web. If I could prop the tablet up and sync a keyboard to the device and work on any documents that I need without the hassle of dealing with copying them manually to another device, that could solve a huge hassle when you’re sitting on the couch decide to type a quick something up and sharing it with others.
Add USB ports (or even microUSB)! Adding two little ports would expand the usability exponentially. The ability to directly connect millions of peripherals to the tablet directly would greatly expand the capabilities of the device without the need to buy any special adapters or new accessories.
Till Next Time