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A Third Major Mobile OS


securitybreach

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securitybreach
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The de-coupling of the mobile industry will proceed apace if Huawei’s plan to license its proprietary mobile OS Harmony comes to fruition.


Zhang Ping’an, president of Huawei’s consumer cloud services, said last week that the company is in talks with other smart device vendors to get them to use the Harmony OS instead of iOS and Android.“We are even more determined to develop our own Huawei Mobile Services, even though we will face restrictions in chip supplies,” said Zhang, “we still have several hundreds of million users. We will use HMS Huawei Mobile Services) and our HarmonyOS to keep serving them.” 

 

“I think we will work together with all hardware makers to build a better ecosystem and help developers avoid switching back and forth between different platforms,” added Zhang.

Huawei intends to bring out its first smartphone with Harmony by the end of this year.

A third major mobile OS could be a very thing IMHO. I struggled with Android for four years before returning happily to iOS but have found the iOS upgrades getting increasingly fussy, complex and non-intuitive.If Huawei come up with something simpler and more intuitive, they’ll have done the world a favour.

 

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22 hours ago, securitybreach said:

It seems to me that they will face the same problems MS did when they came out with the Surface RT.  Only worse.  Who will trust a co. controlled by the Chinese govt?  HP also failed miserably when they tried their own OS.  I can't remember now what it was called but I remember buying the tablet at a huge discount and converting it to Android.

Edited by Bookmem
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securitybreach

Considering that they already have “several hundreds of millions of users” in China, I doubt it will be an issue at all. Plus, Apple and Android spy just as much as Huawei.

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On 10/1/2020 at 1:56 PM, Bookmem said:

It seems to me that they will face the same problems MS did when they came out with the Surface RT.  Only worse.  Who will trust a co. controlled by the Chinese govt?  HP also failed miserably when they tried their own OS.  I can't remember now what it was called but I remember buying the tablet at a huge discount and converting it to Android.

it was WebOS and HP didn't try. (WebOS got sold and morphed eventually to the OS for a tv brand.)

 

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On 10/7/2020 at 3:03 AM, crp said:

it was WebOS and HP didn't try. (WebOS got sold and morphed eventually to the OS for a tv brand.)

 

I don't know what you mean by "HP didn't try".  They produced a tablet with WebOS that was originally priced a several hundred dollars.  But it was such a failure that they eventualy gave up and sold their remaining stock for $100 each.  I know 'cause I bought one.  You make it sound like they stopped producing the tablet because they sold the OS, but it was the other way around.  They sold the OS because the tablet failed to sell.

Edited by Bookmem
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1 hour ago, crp said:

No , they didn't try with the devices.


Agreed. I had one of their Touchpads and it was awesome until they stopped developing. Then I dual booted Archlinux and Android before I gave it to Ken Starks when he was in the hospital. As far as I know, he still uses it.

 

 The tablet itself was very nice and had a great screen (for the time).

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1 hour ago, securitybreach said:


Agreed. I had one of their Touchpads and it was awesome until they stopped developing. Then I dual booted Archlinux and Android before I gave it to Ken Starks when he was in the hospital. As far as I know, he still uses it.

 

 The tablet itself was very nice and had a great screen (for the time).

I still don't understand what you mean by "they didn't try".  If you're stating that they gave up too soon or too easily, that is strickly a matter of opinion.  They had the tablet on the market and it didn't sell.  As you said yourself, "it was very nice", so if it didn't sell, what reason other than the OS? 

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54 minutes ago, Bookmem said:

I still don't understand what you mean by "they didn't try".  If you're stating that they gave up too soon or too easily, that is strickly a matter of opinion.  They had the tablet on the market and it didn't sell.  As you said yourself, "it was very nice", so if it didn't sell, what reason other than the OS? 

 

They didn't bother to create apps or add any of the popular ones to their store. They gave up as in they stopped developing apps and it was entirely their fault:

 

How HP doomed the TouchPad to failure.: The HP TouchPad was one of the shortest-lived mobile products ever produced. HP doomed the TouchPad to failure, either intentionally or through sheer incompetence.

 

 

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9 hours ago, securitybreach said:

 

They didn't bother to create apps or add any of the popular ones to their store. They gave up as in they stopped developing apps and it was entirely their fault:

 

How HP doomed the TouchPad to failure.: The HP TouchPad was one of the shortest-lived mobile products ever produced. HP doomed the TouchPad to failure, either intentionally or through sheer incompetence.

 

 

 

9 hours ago, securitybreach said:

 

They didn't bother to create apps or add any of the popular ones to their store. They gave up as in they stopped developing apps and it was entirely their fault:

 

How HP doomed the TouchPad to failure.: The HP TouchPad was one of the shortest-lived mobile products ever produced. HP doomed the TouchPad to failure, either intentionally or through sheer incompetence.

 

 

I guess it was MS's incompetence that doomed RT then.  Both Android and Apple depend upon third party devs for apps.  No one co. is able to dev the thousands of apps needed to make an OS successul.  It was short lived becuase HP was wise enough to see what was happening with MS's RT and stop throwing good money after bad.  Trying launch their own proprietary OS was the mistake HP made.  Not abandoning it once it proved a failure.  If MS could'nt get RT to succeed with all of the Windows users as a base, how can you really think HP would have if they had stuck with it longer.  The article you linked is just some writer's opinion and means nothing to me.

Edited by Bookmem
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4 hours ago, Bookmem said:

 

I guess it was MS's incompetence that doomed RT then.  Both Android and Apple depend upon third party devs for apps.  No one co. is able to dev the thousands of apps needed to make an OS successul.  It was short lived becuase HP was wise enough to see what was happening with MS's RT and stop throwing good money after bad.  Trying launch their own proprietary OS was the mistake HP made.  Not abandoning it once it proved a failure.  If MS could'nt get RT to succeed with all of the Windows users as a base, how can you really think HP would have if they had stuck with it longer.  The article you linked is just some writer's opinion and means nothing to me.

evidently you weren't around at the time. You are just wrong about the matter. MS RT had nothing to do with webOS or the devices that HP had made for webOS. if you don't want to do the effort of researching the time it is time to move on.

 

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1 hour ago, crp said:

evidently you weren't around at the time. You are just wrong about the matter. MS RT had nothing to do with webOS or the devices that HP had made for webOS. if you don't want to do the effort of researching the time it is time to move on.

 

I was not only around at the time, I bought the $99 Touchpad.  Of course I immediately converted it to Android.  And I was a computer programmer and consultant before the IBM XT or Apple existed.  MS's RT attempt was another example of co attempting to market their own mobile OS that was an utter disaster. HP didn't have the advantage of being an experienced OS development co.  They bought webOS from Palm.  They were completely out of their depth.  I may have the time frame about which came first, HP webOS or Windows RT, but they were around the same time.

Edited by Bookmem
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Hello,

 

webOS was originally written by Palm, and became Hewlett-Packard's through their acquisition of that company.  I am not sure how much of Palm OS lived on in webOS, but that predecessor certainly did have some success.  I suppose one could arguably say it was the first popular operating system for handheld computing devices/PDAs.  I believe LG still uses it in some of their smart TVs.

 

Hewlett-Packard had its own version of BASIC (HP Time-Shared BASIC) in the 1960s, and HP RTE OS in the 1970s, as well as its own versions of ALGOL and FORTRAN, TODS (used largely by the Air Force, I think).  In the 1980s, they introduced HP-UX, which is still supported today (last release was in May, I believe).  They also have OS experience through companies they acquired like Compaq (which had acquired DEC. Tandem, in turn) as well as working with Intel and Microsoft on Itanium support in OSes, Linux development and so forth.

 

Businesses acquire other businesses for a number of reasons.  Sometimes it is to get their customer base.  Sometimes it is to get their employees.  Sometimes it is to get their intellectual property.  And sometimes it is to get their product lines.  In Hewlett-Packard's case, the acquisition of Palm Computing (and webOS) may have been more of a defensive move to bolster its patent portfolio against Apple than from any desire to create a large ecosystem of webOS-based devices.

 

Regards,

 

Aryeh Goretsky

 

 

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