Comment by hajile

WebOS had a native development kit in addition to the web one.

They were way ahead of the game with stuff like wireless charging and the SoC was cutting-edge for its time with fast (1.2GHz, but the chip was designed to run at 1.5GHz and overclocking to 1.8-2GHz was not too hard) partially OoO dual cores and 128-bit SIMD instead of 64-bit like A9 paired with a good LCD. The UI as shipped was already ahead of its time and if you look around for the cancelled Mocha UI, I think it would look pretty modern even today.

The big issue is that they were a web-first platform, but their version of Webkit and JS JIT were years out of date which meant they were behind on web standards and WAY behind on JS performance at a time when JITs were still getting faster at a very rapid pace. The CPU was fast compared to everyone else, but it was still slow and they needed to focus on performance a bit more.