The webOS story is a sad and bizarre tale by any standards. The mobile platform and gadgets produced by Palm didn’t catch the public’s eye and was bought by HP for a boatload of cash. HP threw its massive weight behind webOS in a token effort, only to kill all webOS devices.
The much-ballyhooed TouchPad tablet was killed along with all webOS phones mere days after it hit the market. HP apparently lost its taste for the highly competitive mobile game and shut the entire platform down. In an effort to soften the blow of yanking the rug out from under its customers the company made a big deal out of offering webOS to the open source community.