Angry Engineers Hacked The iPad 2 To Run webOS To Show How Much HP’s Hardware Sucked

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Angry Engineers Hacked The iPad 2 To Run webOS To Show How Much HP’s Hardware SuckedShareTweet By John Brownlee (7:15 am, Aug. 19, 2011)

Want to know why HP is killing off its webOS Device division after releasing just a single product? Let’s leave the abysmal sales numbers of the TouchPad out of things. The fact of the matter is that HP just wasn’t any bloody good at making webOS devices. According to a new report, in fact, the iPad can run a hacked version of webOS twice as fast as the HP TouchPad, despite roughly equivalent hardware.

Sources speaking to The Next Web state that even the webOS software team thought the hardware side of things was hopelessly inept and “wanted them gone.”

To prove their point, they actually hacked webOS:

The hardware reportedly stopped the team from innovating beyond certain points because it was slow and imposed constraints, which was highlighted when webOS was loaded on to Apple’s iPad device and found to run the platform significantly faster than the device for which it was originally developed.

With a focus on web technologies, webOS could be deployed in the iPad’s Mobile Safari browser as a web-app; this produced similar results, with it running many times faster in the browser than it did on the TouchPad.

This is interesting to me for a couple of reasons. For one, it shows that there’s a huge divide in perceived competence within HP between the software and hardware side of webOS. If that’s true across all of HP, no wonder the company is looking to spin-off its hardware division to focus on cloud and enterprise services: that’s where all their talent is.

The second? Despite being limited to running on Qualcomm silicon, HP’s successfully ported webOS to the iPad 2's ARM-based CPU. That means that HP might very well be able to license webOS to other electronics makers with a few tweaks… or maybe sell the OS outright to Samsung?

17 comments »

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About the author

John Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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Posted in News, Top stories | Comment on this article

http://www.jeffkibuule.com Jeff Kibuule

It isn’t the hardware. Seriously. It’s the software stack which webOS runs on that makes it slow. HTC uses the same CPU in its Android smartphones and the performance on their is fine, but Android is a Dalvik VM instead of a HTML5 + CSS interpreter.

http://www.jeffkibuule.com Jeff Kibuule

It isn’t the hardware. Seriously. It’s the software stack which webOS runs on that makes it slow. HTC uses the same CPU in its Android smartphones and the performance on their is fine, but Android is a Dalvik VM instead of a HTML5 + CSS interpreter.

http://www.jeffkibuule.com Jeff Kibuule

It isn’t the hardware. Seriously. It’s the software stack which webOS runs on that makes it slow. HTC uses the same CPU in its Android smartphones and the performance on their is fine, but Android is a Dalvik VM instead of a HTML5 + CSS interpreter.

Anonymous

I don’t know how much this is to be believed. The touchpad is packing 1GB memory, 16/32GB storage capacity, 1.2GHz dual core Snapdragon.  Basically its not the hardware, since the hardware is as good (maybe better?) as (than) the ipad2.  And last I checked, that 1.2GHz dual core Snapdragon is in other devices (phones) and its was raved on how good it is.  So I don’t think its the hardware or the basic hardware needed to run it.

But about the phones?  I could see that, because the hardware was way behind in the phone world.I’m going to have to play it safe and say its compete B.S.  Someone claims that they have insider information, so they can get the hits.

http://twitter.com/BrianVoll Brian

Aren’t people still struggling to get older versions of Android running on 1st and 2nd gen iPhones? How did they get webOS running on iPad 2 so quickly? I know they have the source code and everything… But they would have had to modify the boot loader, etc to get it on iPad. I just see some kind of falsity on this. I’m probably wrong, but I don’t believe it.

http://twitter.com/BrianVoll Brian

Aren’t people still struggling to get older versions of Android running on 1st and 2nd gen iPhones? How did they get webOS running on iPad 2 so quickly? I know they have the source code and everything… But they would have had to modify the boot loader, etc to get it on iPad. I just see some kind of falsity on this. I’m probably wrong, but I don’t believe it.

Anonymous

Apple has tuned its hardware specifically to run at optimum efficiency for iOS, the Arm SOC they are running is designed specifically in conjunction with iOS. Also according the the article they were running WebOS in the browser not as the underlying OS on the iPad.

Anonymous

Apple has tuned its hardware specifically to run at optimum efficiency for iOS, the Arm SOC they are running is designed specifically in conjunction with iOS. Also according the the article they were running WebOS in the browser not as the underlying OS on the iPad.

Anonymous

Apple has tuned its hardware specifically to run at optimum efficiency for iOS, the Arm SOC they are running is designed specifically in conjunction with iOS. Also according the the article they were running WebOS in the browser not as the underlying OS on the iPad.

Anonymous

Apple has tuned its hardware specifically to run at optimum efficiency for iOS, the Arm SOC they are running is designed specifically in conjunction with iOS. Also according the the article they were running WebOS in the browser not as the underlying OS on the iPad.

MacGoo

C’mon, release the hack!

Anonymous

This horse is dead… Stop beating it!

Anonymous

Honda’s & Toyota’s are more efficient + handle better than most cars on the road, yet use the least amount of power compared + NO one can figure out how they combine engine efficiency with handling, that best’s the competition. Apple is NO different. While the “competition” uses bigger processors & chases bigger stats, Apple uses half the power & runs its OS more smoothly than the rest, on their own customized chip. That’s the secret sauce the “competition” can’t figure out. No different than “McDonald’s” or “KFC”. Except they’re making more money than those 2 combined too! 

Anonymous

Perhaps WebOS should be competing directly with ChromeOS instead of iOS and Android.

Anonymous

Honestly Google should scoop up WebOS and implement it into chromeOS development…or maybe RIM and QNX………NAAAHHHHHHHH!!!

Anonymous

iPad + webOS = my dream tablet

Anonymous

hp should just close shop already.

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