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Somehow it's been 13 years and none of the available phone OSes have managed to be as usable or user-focused as WebOS was. Nor as easily hackable. The hardware was smooth like a river rock in your pocket, but still had an easily found physical slider switch to silence the device. It had wireless charging as a standard feature. And the software stack was familiar to any desktop Linux user with just a custom display layer on top. Complex multi-tasking was effortless on it (thanks in part to the gesture area and also the OS's cards interface). And it combined all contacts and messages regardless of communications channel into a unified interface. Oh, also, replaceable batteries!

Unfortunately HP played musical CEOs (three in less than a year) and one of them didn't see phones or PCs as businesses they should be in.



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