It’s been a year and a half since HP stopped selling phones and tablets running the webOS operating system. But since then HP has transitioned webOS into an open source operating system and we’ve seen early builds ported to existing devices such as the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone and Asus Transformer Pad tablet.

Now the folks at webOS Ports have managed to get Open webOS up and running on a Google Nexus 7 tablet, and it almost looks like it was designed for the tablet.

The Nexus 7 features an NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor and a 7 inch, 1280 x 800 pixel display. Despite the fact that no webOS device ever had either of those things, the Open webOS team has put some work into making sure the operating system can work on hardware that’s not supported by HP.

While the videos we’ve seen showing Open webOS on the Galaxy Nexus smartphone show a sluggish proof-of-concept operating system that almost seems to be running in slow motion, the operating system seems to run much more smoothly on the Nexus 7.

It also runs untethered — which means you don’t need to plug the tablet into a PC to run the software.

The demo video does show a bit of lag when performing some actions. But websites load quickly in the web browser, the on-screen keyboard seems pretty responsive, and the multitasking system appears to work pretty well.

At this point there’s not really much reason to run webOS on a Nexus 7 instead of the Android software that comes with the tablet. Android is still more stable, offers more third-party apps, and it’s available (webOS Ports hasn’t released an installer yet). But it’s starting to look like Open webOS could one day provide a viable alternative… or at least a playground for folks to tinker with their tablets.

If you’re keeping track, this means it’s now possible to install Ubuntu, Chromium OS, and Bodhi Linux on the Nexus 7. I wonder what will come next…

via webOS Nation

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2 replies on “Open webOS ported to the Nexus 7, runs nicely (Video)”

  1. It’s so sad HP kill WebOS : this is a fantastic tablet OS.
    I love my touchpad, but it’s so bad there’s no more application developped for it.

    1. Well HP had a very good teacher in how to be inept in the mobile sphere: Palm.

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