WebOS Connect

Tonight I’m heading to WebOS Connect, HP first ever London based developer event

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I’m excited about the potential for WebOS, its still the best mobile OS around. That said competitors are quickly taking the best bits of WebOS and integrating it into their own platforms, WP7 use of the card metaphor for multitasking and Androids use of notifications in Honeycomb.

HP has a huge task on it hands, Palm’s treatment of Europe was sub optimal (to put it politely). For two years developers have watched with envy the regular developer days in New York and California, all European developers could see were power points and the occasional video. This is at odds with the wealth of developer events for Android and iOS all over Europe.

HP needs to make up for lost time, big events like these are great for creating mindshare but what I would like to see are regular sessions highlighting the benefits of WebOS:

Ease of development (HTML/JS/C++ etc)
Ease of Portability (Use the PDK to port from iOS/Android)

All is needed is a room, some laptops and a SME leading the show.

Developers are interested in WebOS once more (WebOS Connect has over 300 attendees from all over the UK at time of writing), but what I want to see is understanding of the mistakes of the past and how HP are moving things forward.

In short HP needs to hit the ball out of the park tonight.