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I had a Palm Pre. There were 2 killer apps, the multitasking and Synergy.

I agree with that statement. Those things seem obvious today, but they were major advances at the time.

I had a TouchPad (actually, I still have it somewhere), which is part of why I'm so bitter about WebOS. I think it was about a month after that tablet came out that HP announced they were axing the project.

The multitasking was true multitasking, so Facebook and AIM and crap were constantly running and the battery life was therefore abysmal. It was navigated by a card system which was adopted by every major mobile phone OS, but with more efficient implementation so as to not kill battery life.

I thought the battery life on my TouchPad was pretty good at the time. Of course, that was a tablet (and not a thin one) so the battery was enormous compared to the phones I was used to, even accounting for the increased screen size. It was also WebOS 2.0, so maybe they had made some battery-saving tweaks by that time? I don't recall that detail.

In any case, I'm sure if they'd been allowed to continue development that problem would have been solved. Android dynamically puts things to sleep depending on what you're using. iOS limits true multitasking to only certain things. Palm would have done something.

A historical note for anyone reading (I get the feeling Funk already knows), a guy named Matias Duarte was largely responsible for the design and UX in WebOS. Shortly after HP killed it, he moved to Android. Not long after that, Android implemented card-based multitasking, and that was the beginning of a very rapid improvement in design and everyday usability in Android. He apparently also had a major role in designing the beloved T-Mobile Sidekick, although I don't know much about that period.

IMO, to this day no one has nailed card-based multitasking quite as well as WebOS, though. It had the ability to stack related cards together in groups. A simple example of this is that if you clicked a link to open something in a browser, the browser card would group with the place you opened it from. But the really unique thing was that you could, say, have your email inbox open in one card, and be composing a message (via the same app) in a different card. I still haven't seen another mobile OS with that capability, although it's standard procedure for any desktop OS.

Synergy also did something perfect for the time, but now is largely irrelevant. This was a phone that combined many different social networks into one feed, as it was a time of different services battling it out. Now, there's basically one microblogging site, one life sharing site, one blogging site, and one video site. Hence, integrating these things to keep in contact with all your friends is nigh useless. Each network is used for different stuff.

It wasn't just social networks, though. It was email, calendars, contacts. Nowadays we take for granted that you can gracefully pull those things from multiple sources into one app, but back then it was new. Or at least, doing it smoothly was new.

I think the first people to catch up with them on the multitasking was HTC with Sense 2.0 later that year, and the social networks soon sorted themselves out.

Man, HTC Sense. Those were the days, huh? It's amazing that HTC became such a minor player in Android, when there was a time that they were the 800-pound gorilla.

The phone was also behind the times. When the Pre launched, it had a fixed focus camera and a low resolution screen. Consider that the year before, HTC had launched the TouchHD, a phone with a 3.8" 800x480 screen, a 5 megapixel AF camera, and even a front facing camera. Pre's specs were not intriguing to power users. This was also a year after the iPhone 3G, and the Pre didn't have the curb appeal of that phone or the new 3Gs. It was innovative, but didn't back it up with hardware, and was cool, but not iPhone cool, so it was never going to work out.

Yeah, that was all hardware, though. I still love WebOS for what it accomplished, and I still hate HP for giving up on it.

Part of me wants to buy an LG Smart TV, despite the fact that I HATE smart TVs, just because they're using WebOS. I'm sure it's not anything like it used to be, though.