“Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated” ~ webOS
In case you have been reading all the doom and gloom about webOS and thought it was dead – it’s not quite dead, Jim. Seriously, a pretty sad turn of events after a roller coaster ride for HP webOS in 2011 summarised nicely by webOS Nation. I think it was basically mismanagment leading to products with sub-stellar hardware (though not as bad as some make it out to be) and a very competitive market. If HP had priced it right, the Touchpad could have been a greater success from the beginning. The firesale was a huge success even though people knew it was an EOL product and webOS as a multitasking OS is still great to use. In fact I use my multi-boot (Android/webOS) Touchpad more than my iPad.
What happens next? webOS isn’t dead yet and at least Meg Whitman has done the right thing by planning to put it to Open Source pasture. Whether it die a slow death there or perhaps someone picks it up and we see another revival, only time will tell. Perhaps in the near future, if there is no new smartphone manufacturer who will use webOS, we could be flashing Opensource webOS to say an HTC or Samsung phone. The webOS community remains vibrant with Homebrew and leaders like webOSinternals in charge.
It’s a pity that it’s basically a two horse race now with webOS out of the picture and Windows Phone struggling to break in. It’s a race that Android is winning for now and to me it looks like the old Mac vs Windows game again. I predict eventually the iOS market will shrink to a small niche area – perhaps 10-20% of mobile users and Android will dominate like Windows did for the next 3-5 years. I doubt Apple can pull any rabbits out of the hat without a visionary like Steve Jobs. It all depends on what they release this year so we’ll know soon enough.
As for medical users, iOS probably dominates though like the rest of mobile users, I suspect Android usage will increase as medical apps for Android are also increasing in number.
As for me, my gadget lust is being pandered to by my Palm Pre3, HTC Android and iPhone 4 smartphones 
My desire for tinkering with app development has since moved on to mobile web apps so I can use (and share) my work on any mobile device I use. At least webOS development has opened my eyes on how easy it is with just HTML5 & Javascript to make an app which runs well in a webkit browser. Multi-platform web app development will be my direction for now and with the increasing use of the connected mobile devices over traditional laptops and PCs (Gartner predicts that by 2013, mobile phones will have overtaken PC’s as the most common way to access the internet), I believe web apps will become more popular.
The advantages of web apps:
- no need to develop specifically for one platform
- rapid and easy development for hobbyist coders (no need to learn complex programming languages!)
- runs fast within modern webkit browsers given improvements to the way Javascript is handled
- can run offline if need be
- can be easily converted native apps with utilities like Phonegap
There are some disadvantages
- inability to access some phone specific functions
- requires Internet access to run (initially at least)
- lacks the visibility that an app market will provide for each specific OS
Are you a medical mobile user who wishes to explore web app development? I shall share my experience in this blog as I make my journey in this direction. I have some exciting plans as well in this area so stay tuned.
Have a great year ahead,
Palmdoc.
from the Palmdoc Chronicles
Happy 2012!
