It's truly amazing to me how poor the hardware is on pretty much every webOS device (with the possible exception of the HP Pre 3, which I've heard good things about but have never seen or used in person). I bought a Palm Pre 2 back in mid-December (for a few different reasons - it was pretty cheap new off-contract ($125), wanted a webOS-powered smartphone because there may not be any made in the future, liked the TouchPad I bought in early November, have a growing, possibly uncontrollable smartphone fetish
), and I was amazed how mediocre the build quality was compared to HTC Trophy and Motorola Droid 2 (and the Apple iPod Touch and RIM Blackberry Playbook I've bought since then). The slider mechanism for the keyboard has some left-right looseness, which makes me worry it will fall apart if used heavily for an extended period. And from everything I've read, the Palm Pre 2 was a major improvement on the original Palm Pre and Palm Pre Plus in build quality! The TouchPad is built better than the Pre 2, but it isn't built as solidly as the other mobile devices I have either.
I have to agree with Team Obi Juan. WebOS is a very nice mobile OS in terms of user interface with the gestures control (plus the notifications control/Synergy is pretty good), but in just about every other way - hardware, battery life, speed - it just doesn't (pardon the pun) stack up to the other mobile OS out there (and mind you, only some of the shortcomings are due to webOS itself). That's really a shame because if Palm and then HP had done a much better job with the hardware, it could have been much more competitive. Having said that, I'll be interested to see what happens, if anything, with webOS now being open source. I could see a company like HTC putting out a webOS smartphone (with the pressure HTC is facing from Apple's lawsuits and Samsung's popularity on Android and from the Microsoft-Nokia relationship on Windows Phone), and I do think HP will make a successor to the TouchPad with webOS on it. Depending on the Google-Amazon relationship, I could even see Amazon moving from Android to webOS for future versions of the Kindle Fire (though I don't think that will happen).