Webos

Yesterday, my Jolla returned from a short stint with Jolla care. I unmounted my Palm Pre2 (which I used for the time my Jolla was not available) and began to set up my phone again - apps, Android support, accounts.

One of the apps I needed regurlarly, although I would prefer using something different for messaging, was Whatsapp. My friends are sending me pictures and do some chatting, my basketball team is organizing itself usinga Whatsapp group. I am using Mitakuulu - and indie Whatsapp client available for SailfishOS. There is no official client, of course -same on webOS and FirefoxOS - so my devices of choice are depending on third-party developers to do some magic. Mitakuulu is very well integrated with SailfishOS, so I never opted in using the Android client.

In February of 2012 I set up an instance of ownCloud, an selfhostable cloud-solution written in php. It was a good feeling to have it around to store my files, calendars and contacts not needing some service provider I knew too little about to be able to judge if they are trustworthy - like Google, Dropbox, Box.net or Zumo Drive.

When I made the switch to Lumia in December 2012 and shortly afterwards giving Windows a new chance on my laptop, it was easy to switch all of the things I had in my ownCloud to Skydrive and other services provided by Microsoft (yes and sorry, but I consider Microsoft more trustworthy than Google or Apple). All other things just would not work well on a Windows Phone, while Skydrive was well integrated into the operating system.

Since LG presented their (cool!) new Smart-TVs powered by webOS, my beloved operating system is trending again. Reviews were positive in general and one must admin that the system looks very promising. In hope to fuel webOS rising again (at least in social media), I have played around with twitter bots on my MSI Windbox running archlinux and created a little bot retweeting things tagged with the webos-hashtag. Due to a bad coincidence of a similar term existing in (Mexican?) slang, there also might be tweets in that timeline not quite covering technology, but hopefully, those are not taking over…

In May I have bought a Jolla smartphone preordering option. In August Jolla sent me a nice T-Shirt showing “I am the first one”, some stickers and a letter saying “Thank you”. I was not sure if I really wanted to get a new smartphone - my Lumia 820 was running fine and I had a whole bunch of webOS-phones ready to run as backups. The mission Jolla was on was nevertheless fascinating, so I wanted to support them.

I am a die-hard user of Palm webOS from the start - I got a Palm Pre on its release day here in Germany and also got a Pre+, a Pre2, a HP Veer, Touchpad and a HP Pre3. After HP killed webOS, I also grabbed a Palm Pixi+ and another Pre as backup devices. Even though it sounds crazy, I have spent a lot of money on a discontinued operating system running on hardware which looks pretty dated in 2013. Still, I love to use my Touchpad. The ui is still awesome, the user experience in the system and most apps are something I am missing with current systems. Still, the keyboard of the Touchpad is unmatched (just my personal view).