My iPhone 3G seemed snappy when I got it in 2008. By the time I retired it in 2010, with iOS 4.0, it was awful.

My Droid X, when I got it in 2010, was much better, but was flakey. When Motorola finally put out Android 2.2 for the thing (late 2010), it finally worked as it was supposed to work, and it worked quite well and snappy. Then, slowly, as I've added stuff to the phone, it's clearly gotten more laggard now than it was previously. Sometimes rebooting the phone fixes these problems. Sometimes not.

I'm intending to get a Galaxy Nexus, once they become available on Verizon, unless Verizon somehow manages to screw it up in a significant fashion. (*Sigh*) If that's the case, then I'll probably wait until March, when I can escape Verizon without paying an early termination fee (but I'd need to double-check my paperwork), purchase a global, unlocked GSM version of the phone, and then bug Rob for the top ten ways of getting reasonable GSM service.

I didn't experience this first hand (due to the 3GS upgrade), but saw it on Tony Fabris's phone. Apple definitely slipped quite a bit when they tried to cram 4.0 onto 2007 era hardware.

On the WebOS side (bringing the topic back a bit), I've found it interesting to watch how the input manager does always seem to be alive. I've not had a case where the screen misses a tap (due to WebOS showing a visible little ripple effect), but I have had plenty of times on the Touchpad where the apps (both 3rd party and bundled ones) are just dead for a while. That to me says they did focus on touch heavily as a priority, but didn't balance that priority properly with the task of ensuring the overall system also remains responsive.

Good postmortem from the folks over at The Verge:

http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/5/3062611/palm-webos-hp-inside-story-pre-postmortem

Lots of bad timing seemed to kill it. I was previously unaware of all the talent they managed to have under their roof. WebOS really could have been a significant and good alternative in the current smartphone market had a few key things gone differently.

If Apple had never entered the market. I believe that's about the only thing that could have given Palm any chance whatsoever.

Agreed, but I would word it another way. More like: "if they hadn't screwed up every step after the announcement." Seriously, they really fumbled every possible move of this thing. They took forever to release the phone, their marketing strategy was askew from the get-go, and then the phone was way too small and FAR too cheaply made/underpowered. Aside from that, they did everything right

I really wish we could see what might have happened if they had put forward the best possible product. I think it would have made for a strong third competitor to Apple and Google, and would have certainly killed Windows Mobile/Phone 7.

The part they did right was leveraging WebKit and building everything around it. They were, indeed, way ahead of the software curve. I'm not entirely sure whether they got the security story right for separating apps and the like (I'm looking forward to Open WebOS so I can take a peek). And sure, the article details how they were screwed on the hardware, extra screwed on relationships with the carriers, and were paid no favors by management.

Still, the WebKit business was indeed slick. And, now that Duarte is on the Android team, you can see his handiwork. Android 4 notably includes his app switcher / task killer.

An ecosystem based solely on apps built on a web framework was and is, overly optimistic and flawed. It's just not where most developers want to be, nor does it offer the best of breed solutions the same developers have been offering on iOS for example.

As much as Google and a couple of others want to push the web, it is not the future of all apps.

But I don't think that had anything at all to do with the failure of the brand and platform.

Oh, absolutely, their failure had far more to do with their business maneuvers than anything with the software architecture.

Still, what really grabs me from the article is the description of how awful their original software was ("five lines of code to center text on the screen") versus the seeming elegance of punting everything to WebKit, which they would presumably need to support well, regardless, so they might as well extend it for systems things. They were even smart enough to initially build what appear to be JavaScript hooks toward their original native functions, so they didn't have to toss all their old code.

And, sure enough, a Palm Pre had really nice graphics. It looked pretty. Too bad about everything else...

Yep - that's something I think MeeGo had going for it. HTML5 apps would have been trivial to support as the low-end entry point.

Then use the same Qt framework underneath Webkit to support both native and HTML5 apis.

And today, an awful lot of Android and iOS apps are really a thin native shell around an HTML widget. This makes apps easier to port across platforms, among other benefits.