Now, it’s not the mystical HP webOS tablet we’ve all been dying for for what feels like forever (read: two weeks), but it’s a step in the right direction.
PreCentral forumgoer cdowers managed to hack webOS onto an old Dell laptop they had laying around — and surprisingly, this “hack” didn’t really require all that much hacking.
Palm’s SDK works by installing a copy of webOS onto a virtual machine (which is exactly what it sounds like: a software computer that, for most purposes, thinks it’s a real computer). Cdowers took that same copy of webOS and instead installed it on an actual machine — and sure enough, it booted.
Now, before you get too excited, know this: this could very well be just about as far as this project goes. There are a handful of hurdles (the lack of touchscreen/gesture area/accelerometer, to name a few) that must be overcome before this comes anywhere close to a usable state — and even once it does, it’ll only play friendly with whatever laptop models the hacker community take the time to support.
Still, it’s fun to look at, isn’t it?