[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.