A preview of webOS 3 and where it’s better than the iPad
(Ad, please don’t block)
PreCentral has a guided tour of HP’s webOS 3.0 Beta 1 running on an emulator. The following is a list of things that webOS 3 does better than the iPad. List and screenshots after the break.
- Device menu (see image below): always present in the top right corner, with: full date, battery percentage, brightness, airport mode on/off, rotation lock, mute sound, etc.
- Notifications (see image below): Incoming messages are briefly displayed in the status bar, and later available via a global menu. The same menu allows one to pause music etc.
- The app launcher has named tabs, which I prefer to Apple’s nameless scheme.
- There is one more row of keys on the virtual keyboard. It must be great to have numbers and characters such as parentheses directly available.
- Exhibition: configure what is shown directly after coming out of sleep (clocks etc.). Will support plug-ins. This has great potential for using a tablet as a nightstand. Or just for general customization.
- Email (see image below): has a three-pane display (all folders, current folder, current message). Individual panes can be expanded to fill the screen.
 |
| The Device menu. [Source: PreCentral] |
 |
| The Notifications menu, with icons giving a summary of its content. [Source: PreCentral] |
 |
| The email client. You can hide the left-most column or maximize the message to full screen, by dragging the handles at the bottom. [Source: PreCentral] |
Related reading:
