At Tap5, we are making boardgames for touch devices. HP / Palm sent us a test device to port the games to the WebOS platform. Here's our impressions so far.

• The notification system is awesome. So much better than the one on iPhone.
• The extra gesture area works excellent once you get to know it. After a few hours it starts feeling very natural. Still, it needs those few first hours of "steep" learning. Wondering if a persona like my mom would ever get it.
• How running apps are presented is awesome. The apps are zoomed-out to about half the screen size, and you flick your thumb left and right to switch inbetween them. If you want to terminate an app, just swipe it upwards and it will disappear. This might sound weird but I found it really elegant and intuitive.
• Resolution- and size-wise, it feels a bit retro with its 2.5" 320x480 pixels display. I'd say though, that the screen hasn't limited me that much.
• Setting up the device is both terrible and wonderful. Terrible: You NEED a SIM-card with GPRS access to be able to access their App Catalog (equiv. to Apple's App Store). Wonderful: In just a few minutes, you've set up your Google and Facebook accounts. Automagically, you get everything set up for your. E-mail, contacts, calendar, even chat. This is the best account integration I've ever seen on a smartphone.
• The speed of the Pre 2 is not impressive. Most of the time it works fine, but in several situations you are reminded that this hardware is something like an iPhone 3 and not comparable to the latest strong smartphone hardware. For a dev phone this is all OK (it can even be an advantage!) but not to consumers. However, newer models are said to ship this summer.

When it comes to the actual porting, it couldn't be easier. Since apps in WebOS are written in HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript, It Just Works[tm]. I am amazed. This is excellent news for Tap5 games!

Footnote: Microsoft recently announced that Windows 8 will use HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript as their default app architecture. Are webapps becoming the default platform now?