Palm's WebOS impressed all, when it was announced last year. It brought with it some "never before" features. This smartphone operating system was the reason that the Palm Pre gave the iconic Apple iPhone some sleepless nights. Some of the features that Palm's OS offers remain unbeatable to this day. So what makes the WebOS so special? Head along...

The WebOS has been designed to suit human behavior. Palm seems to have done their homework well. They've got into intricacies to make handling of day-to-day tasks, a breeze.

Multi-tasking
One of the biggest complaints about the iPhone was its lack of multi-tasking. Palm hit the nail on the head by offering the WebOS with multi-tasking ability. You can have several apps and browser windows open at the same time. All these open windows are arranged in the form of a deck of cards on the smartphone's screen. You can flip through them with your finger.

A small dashboard at the bottom of the screen gives notifications whenever there is a new mail, or message or IM. So, you will not be disturbed by annoying pop-up notifications, when you're busy with something else. You can continue with what you're doing or switch to see the new mail or message. Hence, notifications are unobtrusive.

The iOS4, which is Apple's latest iPhone OS, introduced with the brand new iPhone 4, also brings the multi-tasking ability to the device. However, there is a big difference between iOS4's multi-tasking and WebOS's multi-tasking. While you can have several open app-windows in the iOS4 device, most of them will not run in the background. They will merely be paused when you move to another open window. They will resume from where you had left them, once you return. Only streaming of music, downloading of files and GPS activities are designed to run in the background when you're working on something else in the foreground. The WebOS, on the other hand, allows background functioning of almost all apps. Suppose you have Facebook or Gmail or any other email account or IM open in the background, they will automatically update themselves when you're doing something else in the foreground.

Multi-Touch and Gesture recognition
Like the iPhone OS, the WebOS too supports multi-touch. You can use two fingers to zoom in and out. Gesture based operations are as well supported. Flipping through photographs or open applications and sweeping an app upward to close it are some of the gestures that are recognized.

Synergy
This is a new feature that the WebOS brought with it. Synergy syncs up various entities in your phone and life.
1. It pulls contacts from all different places, like Facebook, Gmail, Outlook, Twitter and more and presents them to you in an organized manner. You don't have to shift from one account to another to find the contacts. Moreover, it pulls each contact's details, even if they are scattered between these various sources and puts them all together.
2. Not just contacts, even your calendars from various accounts are pulled together and shown to you in a single view. You needn't shift from office calendar to personal calendar to find out your schedules or free time. Apart from the consolidated view, the calendars can be viewed individually as well.
3. A Buddy List can be created to keep in touch with your close ones, seamlessly. This list combines contacts from various IM accounts. If you've been chatting with one of the contacts in your buddy list using IM, you can continue this same conversation as a thread on SMS too.

Universal search
Searching for anything on a WebOS device is made very easy. You just need to start typing the word, and you will be presented with a list of matching options from every nook and corner of the device. There's provision to look for the same over the internet too, if you don't get a matching option in the device.

These sum up the most note-worthy WebOS features.

Compare mobile phone prices, find latest models and read unbiased
reviews on best selling mobile phone models.