Although still officially in pre-Alpha, the folks at Phoneix have made significant progress with their webOS-on-Android project.
Essentially, the team is working to create a webOS app capable of running on Android-powered smartphones and tablets.
As Derek Kessler of webOSNation explains, this would allow webOS enthusiasts to run both operating systems simultaneously – instead of booting into one or the other.
Back in October, webOS-on-Android was more of a proof-of-concept project, but now Phoenix has broken past the lock screen, allowing the OS to run on a Samsung Nexus S.
“It’s not perfect – there’s still a lot of work to be done – as the stuttering and sluggishness driven by the lack of working hardware acceleration shows, but it’s [still] progress,” writes Kessler.
“It has to be launched via Terminal commands, though eventually Phoenix does plan to implement a launcher icon for the Android side of things. Phoenix has also borrowed some elements from the open source work of the WebOS Ports team, including the swanky phone-sized virtual keyboard they unearthed.”
As TG Daily previously reported, enthusiasm for HP’s (Palm) webOS remains quite high, even if the industry heavyweight is no longer actively promoting the open source OS.
Indeed, 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, while programmer Ping-Husn Chen has put together a LiveCD/LiveUSB image of an unofficial Open webOS Live distro which is based on the desktop build and mkxpud for Ubuntu 12.04.
Clearly, the resurrection of webOS on Android tablets and smartphones both epitomizes and actualizes the notion of open source development in the developer community.
