I'd like to make a point for an alternative to IOS and Android on smartphones. Being still somehow emotionally attached to OS/2 which I used for a long time I found myself preferring the non-mainstream smartphone platform, too

What makes it me preferring it to the two big ones? Now first of all the hardware is really nice - the Pre3 is powerful and has this really nice hardware keyboard, and I also like the Pixi which is much less powerful but can be considered the smallest smartphone out there.
This goes along with a busybox-based Linux underneath, and unlike on Android it really does feel like a Linux system. Consequently the first thing I did was install some xterm-like app. Nice thing, while on a train with my colleagues (all developers) we needed to download a file while the net was poor - the guys with their Androids kept restarting the download, I did a 'wget --continue' and got there frist

Now WebOS has a really active open source community. It does not come with the largest number of apps, but it has practically everything one needs (the skype integration is really nice). The phones produced by HP (Veer and Pre3) can be bought for little money through amazon's market or ebay, and they're more than worth the money, actually you get much more for it than if you purchase an Android device.

The whole thing reminds me of good old OS/2. Abandoned by its makers, kept alive by open source developers, will probably not last forever

Yeah, I also like WebOS more than Android. It is just not that bloated, feels better.

I was surprised at how well WebOS does multitasking when I tried it on my Touchpad. It felt like a decent OS and I'm surprised that HP discontinued it so quickly. I think they gave up on it too soon. Right now I dual boot WebOS and Android ICS. Android's biggest advantage right now is number of apps, but there have been talks of a way of being able to run Android apps in WebOS. With all of the developer support on this tablet, I can't wait to see the source based WebOS ROMs that will come out.

my girlfriend has a WebOS phone and it's GUI and way of interaction feels really nice, but there is one thing, that cannot be held for good about webOS: speed...every app, regardless how helloworldish-small it is, takes in the scale of seconds to launch

unfortunately they never quite got around this problem except for using really strong hardware like in the touchpad

Well, I think that's better than Android anyway, where apps are mostly written on Java.

the only problem (non-ICS) phones with android have regarding performance is fps while scrolling

my apps start up fast and at least since 2.2 with the JIT, performance for pretty much anything except 3D-games (there is the native SDK for it) is just not an issue

Yes, and I think that is the main problem with Android. Interface is not smooth, also too many options. From what I have seen, WebOS interface is much easier to use. 3D games are actually pretty easy to render for ARM chips nowadays, so they will be fast on, well, anything (except low-budget devices).

I don't know about WebOS, but to compare iOS with Android, you can choose a Wi-Fi network easier on iOS (which I connect to very frequently). Let's see:

iOS: Settings --> Wi-Fi
Android: Settings --> Wireless & Networks --> Wi-Fi --> Wi-Fi settings

Even apps settings are somewhere hidden:

iOS: Settings --> [APPNAME]
Android: Settings --> Applications --> Manage Applications --> [APPNAME]

So the settings are correctly organized based on what people use more and less frequently. Also, the overall laginess of Android at some points makes you think you are using a 90s PC with the OS loaded from a floppy. That's my opinion of course.

EDIT: It is also easy to connect to Wi-Fi (and select network) on the Touchpad. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9qss0euxZ4
So yeah, that's an OS made for humans, who want an easy access to data.

WebOS: Upper Menu --> Wi-Fi

On Honeycomb and newer there is a menu by the clock that can toggle wifi, etc very similar to what WebOS has. I find WebOS to still be a bit nicer at it but Android has come a long way since Gingerbread. Also you can add shortcuts commonly used settings or widgets to toggle these. I seems more tedious to turn on Wifi in iOS compared with having the power control widget on an android device.

I'm not sure why you think Android is so slow. iOS is fast because its a much simpler OS with minimal background services and mulittasking and no desktop/widgets, which has its adcantages such as having more hardware power available for the current running app. On the Touchpad Android boots faster than WebOS and launches apps faster than WebOS. But its running Cyanogenmod which is a pure source derived build with speed in mind and none of that bloatware that phones have which makes a huge difference. Also the Touchpad has some pretty decent hardware 1.2ghz dual core ARM and 1GB of RAM so pretty much anything should run smoothly on it. Its a totally different experience than on a bloated android phone where all the RAM is gone and there is lag on menus.

That being said the Touchpad is a great tablet if you want to try WebOS and I love that you can dual boot. Besides Android there is an ARM build of Ubuntu that works, and there have even been talks of running Windows 8 on it if we ever get an ARM beta.

The main cause of interface lag has always been lack of hardware acceleration, which iOS had from day one. Android does this since 3.0 for most of its rendering, so newer phones with 4.0 are a significant leap forward here up to a point, where lags while scrolling are not an issue to mention anymore.

I personally don't own an iOS-device, but from what I've heard it's also not heaven on earth and e.g. the notification system on android is still better than the one on iOS (as I said, I have no personal experience, just what people are saying) and the new "webOS-style" multitasking-scheme since 3.0 is also one of the points superior to the plain old "Android-style" LRU-List of App-Icons still used in todays iOS

EDIT: don't want to claim, that android as a whole is superior to iOS, it's just not as simple as "Apple is best in everything" like quite a few people would like it to be

This is certainly true for most apps. The culprit is the web-based technology underneath. There once was an article in the NYT claiming that the whole idea was doomed from the beginning as WebKit simply was insufficient for getting to performance comparable to IOS (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/02/technology/hewlett-packards-touchpad-was-built-on-flawed-software-some-say.html?_r=2&hpw).
However the Pre3 is a pretty fast phone, and the software runs pretty smoothly on it.

@spunker88,
Yeah, WebOS may be slower than CyanogenMod'd Android, but it is still easier to use, and feels like it is natural. When you scroll a page too much, you can see the empty area (so you can infinitely scroll), then it goes away after a second. iOS also has that. Android doesn't. Which makes it kinda strange to see why it still doesn't have that.

And still, if you have widgets, yes. But what if you already have too many widgets and just want to use other settings, which are still hidden somewhere in the Settings app.

@orsg,
Actually, iOS has hardware acceleration since 2007, and the first version - 1.0 (hence it's native on iDevices). Android has got it since 3.0, as you said (still lags at some point), so yeah.

Good point. Android devices usually need pretty fast hardware to work well. Last year I was involved in a software project for Android and had lots of test devices. Most of them were plain crap for what we did, just because processing power was insufficient.

However compared to WebOS I would not say that Android is in general slower. Once the VM has loaded the classes you are using, Java apps can be very fast. On WebOS the web-technology used for displaying the GUI is still the bottleneck.

If open source development really kicks off, there's still a lot of possible optimisation, from WebKit improvements to smarter use of it. I really hope that WebOS will not just disappear after the current devices have died out.

Yep, that is really the most important disadvantage of Android IMO. When I started using Android it was for a software project, and I had used WebOS before. It felt like a p(l)ain downgrade to me.
On a phone I want an interface that allows me to do things without having to dedicate my whole attention to it, ideally just with my thumb. Both WebOS and IOS do that pretty well, Android is still a complete failure in that respect.

there was one little thing I noticed when using webOS, that somehow seemed completely out of place
this little menu button on the top left makes me expect some serious amount of functionality behind it, like I'm used to on Windows, Linux-based Desktops or Android. Yet in nearly every app, it simply holds "cut" "copy" and "paste". using a dedicated menu for this functionality is something I expect from an ancient UI like OpenOffice, but in the context of webOS it simply feels like a relict from times ago

Depends on the app. If the app has a configuration panel that menu is the place to look for it.
But really, on a mobile OS you don't want to have to hit that tiny spot with your thumb just to get that menu...
And since the preferences aren't anything you need to access all the time I think that's OK the way it is.

While we compare WebOS to IOS and Android, let's involve the lovely platform called Windows Phone.

MS seem to have done their homework with that one (still remember those absolutely unusable phones which even had a start menu). However I don't really wish them any success. It's personal. A company that has continuously been coming up with feature-loaded yet buggy software while not fixing serious bugs does not have my sympathy. We parted company when Winword 6.0 had twice as many icons in the toolbar while still not being able to save documents of 100+ pages in many cases. I never regretted it.

I prefer android, mostly because it is easy to customize which OS version you have on it. I had a andorid phone with 2.2 on it that ran like crap. I installed one of the community version of android 2.3 on it, and it runs magnificently. My dad has a viewsonic tablet that had 2.2 on it with a horrible interface. I found 3.0 for it, installed it, and it runs very, very good

I'm a HUGE webOS enthusiast.

I had a launch-day Pre-, a FrankenPre2, and now a Pre3 that I switched to AT&T for. webOS is fast, beautiful, and intuitive. The multitasking is a dream, and the Pre3 is some surprisingly good hardware...

Open webOS is coming a long way. http://openwebosproject.org - check it out! Isis browser based on QTWebKit, and a whole host of improvements starting at the kernel level.

Is the Pre3 really so much better than the previous phones? The Pre Plus of my girlfriend is pretty...not so good in this regard. It's only about one year old and the powerbutton is pretty loose and hardly works anymore, occasionally you can't hear anything during a call, and the touchstone loading progress switches between loading and not loading every 2sec, although the phone is aligned as good as possible.

Anyway, I wish Open webOS all the best, but I'm not overly optimistic about its future. So far no commercial vendor seems to be interested in investing into the project. What happens to a project when commercial support drops (I'm sure HP won't be there forever) and it's not the hottest topic on earth can be seen in case of OpenSolaris/Illumos:(
At first they should try to ramp up their performance. Maybe V8 could speed up JavaScript compared to the current engine?

I'd say yes. The hardware is much sounder, also the camera is much better. The material does not feel so cheap.
Only thing that bothers me a bit is minor bugs in the software. The media service is pretty unreliable when it comes to mp3 files with non-US-ASCII id3 tags (I listen to Ukrainian music a lot), thus you get funny effects like no playlists etc., also to me the syncing of my google account seems to have got less reliable.

Still I like the phone a lot. I usually switch between my Pre3 and my IPhone every 3..4 weeks