HP Launches Open webOS 1.0

HP's TouchPad and Palm devices may be long and gone, but webOS (the mobile OS that these devices ran off of) has been alive and well despite its hardware extinction, mostly thanks to its open-source status. Open webOS, as its now called, went into beta in August, and now a month later, a final stable build is ready for consumption as version 1.0.

The 1.0 release offers some changes that the Open webOS team hopes will offer major new capabilities for developers. The team also mentions that over 75 Open webOS components have been delivered over the past 9 months (totaling over 450,000 lines of code), which means that Open webOS can now be ported to new devices thanks to today's 1.0 release.

In the video below, Open webOS architect Steve Winston demoes the operating system on a HP TouchSmart all-in-one PC. He mentions that it took the team just "a couple of days" to port Open webOS to the PC that he has in front of him. The user interface doesn't seem to be performing super smoothly, but you can't really expect more out of a 1.0 release.

Winston says that possible uses for Open webOS include kiosk applications in places like hotels, and since Open webOS is aimed to work on phones, tablets, and PCs, there's the possibility that Open webOS could become an all-in-one solution for kiosk or customer service platforms for businesses. Obviously, version 1.0 is just the first step, so the Open webOS team is just getting started with this project and they expect to only improve on it and add new features as time goes on.