In many ways this is true, and in many ways it wasn't, I think.
webOS as a concept, way ahead, as an implementation, it had lots of prickly bits. Mojo (the UI SDK) was great to work with but only went so far. Palm and then HP tried to move forward with Enyo but came way too late, and they never delivered on promises of hardware access APIs.
Once it started changing hands, it was a lost cause, you just lose a lot of knowledge and passion when entire code bases get handed around to new teams. For a mobile platform to really do something good, it needs to be a few years ahead of the hardware it lands on. webOS was until HP acquired it, they had video recording before the iPhone (just barely) and the gesture area was perfect. The stuff Palm was working on right when HP grabbed them was also really amazing (synergy between devices among other things). But that overhead of transferring ownership made all these projects basically obsolete and in turn the OS :(
webOS as a concept, way ahead, as an implementation, it had lots of prickly bits. Mojo (the UI SDK) was great to work with but only went so far. Palm and then HP tried to move forward with Enyo but came way too late, and they never delivered on promises of hardware access APIs.
Once it started changing hands, it was a lost cause, you just lose a lot of knowledge and passion when entire code bases get handed around to new teams. For a mobile platform to really do something good, it needs to be a few years ahead of the hardware it lands on. webOS was until HP acquired it, they had video recording before the iPhone (just barely) and the gesture area was perfect. The stuff Palm was working on right when HP grabbed them was also really amazing (synergy between devices among other things). But that overhead of transferring ownership made all these projects basically obsolete and in turn the OS :(