Bald Silicon
The Phone that 'Inspired' Apple
In 2009, Palm built a phone operating system that looked years ahead of the iPhone. Apps became cards you could flick away with your thumb. Notifications appeared without interrupting what you were doing. Your contacts from Google, Facebook and work accounts were merged automatically. There was no traditional home button at all — just a gesture area you swiped across to control the phone. It was called webOS. And despite being one of the most innovative mobile operating systems of its era, it failed spectacularly. The Palm Pre was slow, fragile, stuck on the wrong carrier, starved of apps, and built around a software architecture that was both its greatest strength and its biggest weakness. Then HP bought Palm for $1.2 billion, promised to put webOS everywhere, and killed the hardware business just 49 days after launching its flagship tablet. But webOS didn’t really die. Years later, LG bought it, rebuilt it for televisions, and turned Palm’s abandoned phone software into an operating system now used across hundreds of millions of screens. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ORDER MY NEW BOOK "History Written by Losers" — out now! The true story of global power has been whitewashed by the victors and the fixers. This book tells the side of history they tried to bury. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GP9TKPBH ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ IN THIS EPISODE We look at how Palm created webOS, why its card-based multitasking felt so revolutionary, how Synergy combined contacts from multiple services, and why its notification system was years ahead of its competitors. We also dig into the technical decision that ultimately hurt the platform: building so much of the operating system around web technologies, forcing the Palm Pre to do far more work than its hardware could comfortably handle. Then there’s the hardware itself — the infamous “Oreo” slider, reliability problems, Sprint exclusivity, the lack of apps, and the rise of Android while Palm struggled to gain momentum. Finally, we follow webOS through HP’s disastrous acquisition, the TouchPad fire sale, the open-source years, and its unlikely second life inside LG televisions. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ LINKS & SUPPORT The book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GP9TKPBH Documentary channel: https://youtube.com/@thatjasonhassett Subscribe for weekly stories about forgotten technology, failed products, brilliant ideas and the strange decisions that shaped the devices we use today. #Palm #PalmPre #webOS #RetroTech #TechHistory #HP #LG #Smartphones #iPhone #Android #BaldSilicon
