Palm webOS is Palm’s next generation operating system. Designed around an incredibly fast and beautiful user experience and optimized for the multitasking user, webOS integrates the power of a window-based operating system with the simplicity of a browser. Applications are built using standard web technologies and languages, but have access to device-based services and data.

Palm webOS is designed to run on a variety of hardware with different screen sizes, resolutions, and orientations, with or without keyboards, and works best with a touch panel, though it doesn’t require one. Because the user interface (UI) and application model are built on a web browser runtime, the range of suitable hardware platforms is quite wide, requiring only a CPU, some memory, a wireless data connection, a display, and a means for interacting with the UI and entering text.

You can think of webOS applications as native applications, but built from the same standard HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and JavaScript that you’d use to develop web applications. Palm has extended the standard web development environment through a JavaScript framework that provides a toolkit of UI widgets and access to selected device hardware and services.

The user experience is optimized for launching and managing multiple applications at once. Palm webOS is designed around multitasking and makes it utterly simple to run background applications, to switch between applications in a single step, and to easily handle interruptions and events without losing context.

You will build webOS applications with common web development tools following typical design and implementation practices for Ajax applications, but your webOS applications will be installed and run directly on the device, just as you are used to doing with native applications.