by Lee Gillen

Palm is a paradox: despite a strong user community and a great mobile OS, the company was mired in a failed advertising campaign that earned him nothing other than being bought by HP.

The world’s No. 1 personal computer has made a deal: Palm, its catalog of 850 patents, including some very important, and web OS, an OS very promising, does it have cost 815 million euros.A few months after a severe reorganization of teams from Palm, become a business unit within HP’s fate webOS 2.0, HP officially renamed webOS.Is it at level 4 or iOS Android 2.2?

Cards on the Table
The strength of webOS is that it was designed around the multitasking: each task is a map, and you can scroll through the various maps of the fingertip.The system is not particularly far from that of Mac OS or Windows, where windows float above a desk.This implementation has many advantages: it takes a look inside the application, switching from one application to another in a gesture (and not with a double pressure and selection of an application ), and quit an application by ejecting the card from the game webOS 2.0 adds a new feature in its system: batteries, one would have thought.

f we perform an Internet search and you open two or three cards to do this, you end up with three cards for the same task.The cell system offers them together because they belong to the same context.

webOS trying to do it automatically, if you open a link from an email, the map “Navigator” will be stacked with the map “Email.”We can also do it manually: just take a card and slip it into another to create a stack, like the new fashion statement from Mission Control in the future Mac OS X Lion.We can unfold a stack to get a card that would be the background, rearrange the order, or simply close an application by ejecting the card from the pile.

In practice, the cell system interferes a bit with the handling of cards, like the file system interferes with the movement of applications in iOS simple: a deadline a little longer for its activation would have been more convenient.Automatic creation of batteries is a well thought opening a link in an email client in Twitter or Facebook, and we are left with a pile representing a session of “work”.

It can therefore be created small clusters of cards by mixing automatic and manual placement of cards in a pile here a surf session (cards browsers and social networks), is planning a visit (a map calendar, a map SMS, a map Maps), yet also the grouping of email, calendar and contacts from the Exchange box.It says only that the system could be a little further, a little smarter, a little more automated.

Just type
webOS has always had a system of universal search, improved in this new version.It is now called “Just Type” translates into “Now type ‘: it suffices to type to start a search.It allows you to quickly search Google, even offering to Google Suggest (or Wikipedia, IMDb, YouTube, Amazon, Google Maps, Twitter and App Catalog), and obviously local search in contacts, calendars, emails , bookmarks, and applications.

Louder when you visit sites with a search box, Just Type tries to recognize the method and adds it as a search engine.We had no problem adding the search engine MacGeneration, but of iGeneration has never been detected.We can happily sort and delete search engines on the fly.

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ust type but does not stop there: it also contains a section called “Quick Actions”, which creates a task, an email or SMS from the text that was typed.

Palm has made alternative fast action, and developers can plug their applications themselves on the system from an API.After several hours of use, this system becomes central: it allows you to create content without having to open an application (and therefore sometimes navigate to find it), and is particularly convenient.

Apple had no shame in response to integrating Palm Spotlight, we come to expect IOS includes one day such a system, which would be a new gateway for multitasking.

Go to shorter
The textual functions of webOS in general have also been included in order to increase productivity and ease of use: it is not always pleasant to type a long text on a smartphone.Palm has built a system that reminds TextExpander or system shortcuts for the BlackBerry OS.

It allows you to program text snippets that once typed, will convene a longer text: simply said, typing “zzz” will put his signature with the usual politeness, type “mg” to insert ” MacGeneration “, etc..This system is certainly not new is associated with a spell check well ahead of the IOS, which also allows users to manage the words learned word by word in order to correct bad behavior.Again, this is a feature that may seem minor, but which is very pleasant in everyday life.