Through Palm’s application framework, applications can embed UI widgets with sophisticated editing, navigation, and display features, enabling more sophisticated application UI. The framework also includes event handling, notification services, and a multitasking model. Applications can run in the background, managing data, events, and services behind the scenes while engaging the user when needed.

You can create and manage your own persistent data using HTML 5 storage functions and you can access data from some of the webOS core applications, such as Contacts and Calendar. You also have access to some basic system services, most of which are device-resident, such as Location services and Accelerometer data, along with some web services, such as Publish and Subscribe.

Architecturally, Palm webOS is an embedded Linux operating system that hosts a custom UI System Manager anchored by the open source WebKit core. The System Manager provides a full range of system UI features including navigation, application launching and lifecycle management, event management and notifications, system status, local and web searches, and renders application HTML/CSS/JavaScript code.

You don’t need to build a webOS application to make your web content accessible to webOS devices. Palm webOS maintains a separate instance of WebKit, which supports a browser application to handle standard web pages and browser-based web applications. While it’s expected that more and more web content and services will be delivered as webOS applications, there are millions of legacy websites and other information sources that will continue to be presented in ways best viewed with a classic web browser. Palm webOS supports traditional web content very competitively.

Beyond the operating system, webOS includes a number of core applications: Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, Memos, Phone, Web, Email, and Messaging. Other applications are included in the initial release, such as a Camera, Photos, Music, Videos, and Maps, but the full application suite for a given webOS device will vary depending on the model and carrier configuration.