webOS was the final attempt by Palm to regain the smartphone market. It launched with the Palm Pre in 2009, but it failed to attract any consumer attention away from Android and iOS. It did catch HP's eye, though. Palm was purchased by that company for just over a billion dollars, which we would call “half of a Minecraft” today. After a series of unsuccessful products, they started licensing it to LG, who eventually purchased the project (minus patents).
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Ahead of next month's CES, LG announced that a new version will be released at the show. It will be present on their new smart TVs at the show. Some sources claim that the new OS version would also be upgraded on their existing TVs. Unfortunately, this also comes alongside a wave of layoffs at the OS' development group. Former employees claim this was for cost-cutting, while LG says that they intend to consolidate user interface and product management.
We don't typically report on smart TVs, but its heritage as a mobile OS makes it interesting. It has also been used on smart watches, although that area has been silent so-far.
I have SmartTV (Samsung) and
I have SmartTV (Samsung) and this is, as Android is, big slow crap! Samsung says: 4 core CPU for fast speed and best user experience! Ha ha ha. More expensive TVs have 8 core!?
Quad core running at 1GHz and opening a menu takes 3-5 seconds! A menu!
And hardware is only one part of the game. Second one is software. What a disaster! In all aspects! This is reason why Apple rules, user experience! Just for info, I do not have anything from Apple.
When buying new TV I also took a look at LG. Ah, same crap.
I might understand slowness but on TV complete image processing is in hardware with menus in overlays. All the work a CPU must do is to draw a menu in overlay memory. Nothing else! I’m doing this with simple 16 bit microcontroller in no time (takes more time to send data to LCD)
I own a LG Smart TV which
I own a LG Smart TV which runs WebOS. It is badly optimized. The latest patch is about 1 second faster. It still doesn’t allow you to fully optimize it yourself for functions that truly matters.
If you look at it closely, you lose 2-3 seconds per function calls because the OS is generating these fancy fading effects. Effects that doesn’t make my viewing experience any better; because I care more about my selected displayed content than animated shapes.
On top of that, respond rate is also reduced as some functions are being called multiple times. Although they are different functions, they provide the same information. Such as 3 different pop-up/windows that says there’s no input device present and appears one after the other after you close the first.
Throughout the year, support for various apps has been terminated. It’s good in the sense it won’t take you too long to scan through the available apps for WebOS, but to find good useful apps has been cut down to a few.
Poor performance and design of this OS makes you question if you should instead purchase a very large gaming monitor with a NUC attached to it.
For the price, TVs comes at a more affordable cost than a PC Monitor.
Due to my horrendous experience, I now stay away of anything with WebOS.