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HTC Hero Could be Sporting webOS?

By: , 10/29/2010 6:23 pm | 15 comments

It looks like the folks over at xda-developers have plans of porting webOS to an HTC Hero! Not really much to say other than that. Nothing has really been started other than a thread in their forums to get this project off the ground, but we got to admit it sounds cool. We all know that the Pre hardware is far from indestructible. The HTC Hero on the other hand is rock solid like almost every phone made by HTC. The big question is how the heck would the gesture area be incorporated into a phone that lacks one?

One way or another we are excited to see how this thing turns out! Anybody who ever wondered what might have been if Palm had been purchased by HTC instead of HP could find out very soon. If anybody is interested in keeping up with the progress of this port pop over to the xda-developers thread on this matter.

Update: As Rod Whitby so kindly pointed out in the comments this is in fact illegal. webOS is the property of HP/Palm and using it without proper consent is against the law. These kind of things unfortunately happen quite a bit in the Android community. Thanks for the heads up Rod.

[Source: BGR]

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About Ryan St. Andrie

Ryan is a WOR News Hound and super geek who is always working to melt his phone with the latest experimental kernels. He is husband to lovely wife Keira and father to adorable baby girl Kyla, ASE certified mechanic and self proclaimed gearhead turned to railroad mechanic. Last but not least lover of all things tech.
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  • Shane O’Sullivan

    For the gesture area, maybe one tap of the back button does a back swipe, and a double tap swipes up?

  • Aneece

    Couldn’t they pick a phone with a bigger screen (it’s 3.2 inches) and beefier processor (slower than the pixi)? But hey, more power to them, and it could be the start of something neat. =)

  • http://www.webos-internals.org/ WebOS Internals

    I guess no-one has yet considered that any such port would be illegally using proprietary HP/Palm assets …

    – Rod

    • Anonymous

      I actually did not think about that. It is a well known fact that a lot of this kind of stuff that goes on in the the Android community is illegal on several levels. Tolerated but illegal.

      • http://www.webos-internals.org/ WebOS Internals

        Yes, caring about whether something is legal or not is one differentiator between development communities for different mobile operating systems.

        – Rod

      • http://twitter.com/AboutwebOS Mark Coppock

        Maybe it’s tolerated in the Android community because Google has no economic interest in Android other than getting people to click on Google ads. HP-Palm, however, would kind of like to sell devices running webOS, and so I doubt that such a thing would be so tolerated by them.

  • Shadavis08

    i would like to see this though , it would be interesting !!

  • http://twitter.com/AboutwebOS Mark Coppock

    I have no desire to see webOS running on anything but products I can buy from HP-Palm.

  • http://twitter.com/AboutwebOS Mark Coppock

    I have no desire to see webOS running on anything but products I can buy from HP-Palm.

  • Osiris_c3

    Doesn’t the hero have a track ball on it? Could use that for gestures. Anyways I don’t really care to see it but it is flattering that people like webOS enough to try it.

  • Mtda80

    very interesting…

  • Melvin Hunter

    is the port itself illegal? or would it just be illegal to try to profit from it?

  • http://about.me/benfysh Ben

    This could have been closer to reality if @stephenfry had had his way, on the Guardian’s Tech Weekly podcast he says he tried to persuade the people he knows at HTC to buy Palm http://bit.ly/92LXMm (about 6mins in) please Palm give him some of the new devices.

  • DPKueppers

    I would like to see it running, but I want to buy from Palm/HP!
    I am a Mac User and never even thought about buying a clone (even in the days, where clones were legal) But I like benchmarking hardware…

  • Dude

    This is genius. They want to port webOS because obviously it’s a better OS, but this will inevitably lead to people getting other phones to run webOS (since everyone obviously has a Napoleon complex, but with their phones instead of their height), and with every non-Palm phone running webOS, HP’s Palm division dies more and more. Then, webOS dies and what will they have to port? THANKS, GENIUSES.