LG will revive WebOS on a smart TV at CES

WebOS lives! Don’t get too excited though, there’s no new Pre or TouchPad to drool over, it’s just a TV.

At CES next month LG will unvei  its first smart TV that’s powered by WebOS. You may recall that LG bought the patents and rights to WebOS from HP a while back, after HP decided to kill the platform. What was once going to be the third major mobile OS is now going to power TVs so you can watch Netflix without a set-top box.

The good news is that LG will continue Enyo development efforts as part of bringing back WebOS. Enyo is a cross-platform, open-source JavaScript framework that was supposed to be the future of WebOS at one point. The framework lets developers create apps that work on mobile, desktop, and TVs. The framework currently works in app versions of the Chrome browse, including the Android and iOS apps as well as the Kindle Fire HD, Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, and even BlackBerry 10.

The LG HDTV that runs WebOS will use a dual-core 2.2GHz processor and 1.5GB DRAM chips. It will basically have a low-end to mid-range phone built in to power the once-mobile OS. It’s just a shame that a 50+ inch TV is even less suited for a pocket than the HTC One Max and Sony Xperia Z Ultra. Not that I not-so-secretly wish WebOS had actually survived or anything.

But hey, an afterlife as a smart TV platform is better than living on life-support as a printer OS, right? At least a TV can actually use cards and Just Type.