While it will be a little while before see Palm’s WebOS officially ported to tablet or notebook-style devices, it’s probably going to happen soon. In the meantime, you can sort of kind of do it yourself if you have an older PC.

Basically, Palm offers a WebOS emulator for Windows PCs. While the version of the operating system that runs on mobile phones is designed for ARM-based processors, the desktop emulator works with x86 processors like those used in Windows computers. So a member of the PreCentral Forums decided to see what would happen if he took the emulator image, threw it on a hard drive, and tried to boot his computer. It turns out, it boots.

It only works on hard drives with IDE connections, so if you have a SATA hard drive you’re out of luck at the moment.

There’s currently no support for mouse input, so you’ll have to navigate using a keyboard and touchscreen — if you have a touchscreen PC. And the user interface doesn’t scale to the size of your display yet. But the guy who figured out how to boot a PC from the emulator image is working on patches for those things.

You can check out a video of WebOS on a Dell Latitude C600 after the break.

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,543 other subscribers

2 replies on “Palm WebOS running on a PC”