Interest in Hewlett Packard’s (Palm) Open webOS remains higher than ever, despite the fact that HP is no longer actively promoting the stalwart OS.
Indeed, an early build of Open webOS 1.0 was recently loaded on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone, while a talented dev by the name of Steven Troughton-Smith is coding a port of Open webOS for the popular Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime tablet.
And now the webOS Ports team has managed to load and run Open webOS on a Google Nexus 7 tablet, which is powered by Nvidia’s Tegra 3 quad-core processor and features a 7 inch, 1280 x 800 pixel display.
As you can see in the video, the operating system seems to run relativelysmoothly (untethered) on the Nexus 7, which was originally designed for Google’s mobile Android operating system.
As Liliputing’s Brad Linder notes, there really isn’t much reason to run webOS on a Nexus 7 instead of Android, at least at this stage, as Google’s operating system is far more stable, offers an extensive ecosystem and is widely available.
“[However], 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,” he added.
It should probably also be noted that Google’s versatile Nexus 7 tablet is capable of running a number of alternative operating systems, including Ubuntu, Chromium OS and Bodhi Linux.
