My webOS Wishlist#
I love webOS. I think it is the best mobile operating system ever made, and I would not even think about switching from my Pre to any other phone currently on the market.
There are, however, many things I wish Palm would either do differently, or even just do in the first place.
- Make webOS more attractive: Whenever I get the chance to play around with an iPhone or an iPod touch, I marvel at how sleek the operating system looks. webOS lacks that same level of spit and polish. Honestly, the webOS interface is pretty bland, and I wish Palm would go in and spruce it up.
- Contextual gestures: Palm already started down this road with their implementation of cut, copy and paste: hold one finger on the gesture bar and press x, c or v. Why not go further, though? [Gesture bar] + z for undo, [Gesture bar] + n to open up a new card (in say, Browser). Remember, pseudo-modal interactions (like these) are better than modal interactions, like opening up the application’s menu to access these.
- No bloatware!: The preinstalled NFL and NASCAR apps have to go, along with 2/3 of the Sprint apps. Palm, I don’t care if they pay you to put it on my phone—I don’t want them, and I bought the phone, so could you please not prevent me from uninstalling them? Apple would never do this, and this is another place you need to take a page out of their book.
- Trials in the App Catalog: way way WAY too many apps in the App Catalog are just free “lite” versions of paid apps. There should be a way to try out paid apps for a certain amount of time and then buy the full version. Not only would this get rid of a lot of clutter in the App Catalog, but people would buy more apps because it wouldn’t cost anything to try out paid ones.
- More control over Synergy: Some features of Synergy are great, like merging text messages and instant messages into the same stream. And some are horrible, like the fact that any Synergy-enabled app digs as deep into your phone as it possibly can. I haven’t added any instant messaging accounts to my Messaging app, or even installed the Facebook app in the first place. Why? All my friends instantly get imported to my contacts, whether I want them or not. Would it be so hard to have an option to only import data for people already in my contacts list?
There you go: my list of things Palm should do with webOS. It’s a great platform now, for sure, but there’s definitely tons of room to improve.
