[jetz]

QT, really? Using a framework for a must-be-power-efficient device on a much-slower-than-desktop cpu. I'm not a QT or C++ expert and wondering outcomes of using QT for webOS. There is absolutely a hit on power and speed but how much?

[moondowner]

Actually Qt is in use on several low-power boards and it shows excellent performance. Just google a bit and you'll find some examples.

[densh]

Qt is about as low level as iOS's Objective-C runtime (both are compiled to native code and offer semi-manual memory management.) Meanwhile Android is based on full-blown virtual machine (Dalvik) with garbage collection.

HTML5 on the other hand is an elephant in the room. Promoting it as THE way to write apps for WebOS was a huge mistake. It's terrible inefficiency lead to stuttering ui and godawful memory consumption.

Also Qt has been used for graphical embedded projects for years (e.g. it doesn't require X11 on linux and can be compiled on many different architectures.)

[lsh]

<quote>HTML5 on the other hand is an elephant in the room. Promoting it as THE way to write apps for WebOS was a huge mistake. It's terrible inefficiency lead to stuttering ui and godawful memory consumption.</quote>

Agreed. Applications can be written in Javascript using the Enyo framework (Enyo 2 for Open WebOS) so you don't see much html5, but applications can also be written in c++ and their performance is excellent.

Enyo v2 is really superb and you get an awful lot of gui magic for very little: http://enyojs.com/ It recently released it's first stable 1.0 but even their pre-stable versions were really quite comprehensive.

Purely anecdotal, but in Android (Cyanogenmod) vs webOS power management I've found webOS beats it hands down. I just turned my Touchpad on now for the first time in a few days and the meter is reading as 43%. I don't use it heavily, usually just in hour or two sessions and charge it about once every four or five days.

[VMG]

It's closer to the metal than Dalvik