Synergy

From the calendar, to the contacts, to facebook and google, synergy brings in all this into a neat little package. I thought this was really nice when I first used Synergy, but I never really knew how amazing it is until I replaced my phone. Restoring all my applications, contacts, and calendars was as easy as logging into my Palm Profile and the other accounts.

webOS Community

Second to none is the webOS community. The most zealous and passionate mobile phone community. It is most evident by the way homebrew has taken off and how the good people over at webOS internals, webOS Roundup, precentral (just to name a few) have dedicated countless of hours to making this the best mobile operating system in the world.

Homebrew

Speaking of the webOS community, the homebrew available for this phone is out of this world. I’m not only talking applications, but rather patches and pushing the limits of the hardware. I think what makes webOS so much better than all the other mobile OS out there is customization and how easy it is for anyone to customize their device to their liking. I’m talking brightness controls to overclocking the CPU to 1GHz to visual changes to the icons in the launcher. The customizations are endless and instead of being displayed in a tedious wall-of-settings type of display, they are provided by the wonderful homebrew installer Preware.

Palm (and now HP)

They do know how to win over loyal customers. They take the cake by being hard at work at providing mobile OS updates very frequently, accepting and embracing homebrew, giving back to the webOS community, and for their work in the open-source community. Their developer relations team also merits some thanks for their hard work too.

webOS SDK+PDK

By far the most developer-friendly SDK ever created. Sure there are some quirks here and there but it’s definitely very solid and provides plenty of options. What’s best is that if the SDK doesn’t suit your needs then you can use the PDK.

HTML5, JS, CSS

This was a genius idea. I believe the future is in the web, and the future is in the cloud. And Palm made a genius move by making the web the core of their operating system. This will help advance the future of web development and better our current web technology standards. Thanks Palm!

Type to Search

Sick feature. And with synergy it’s even better. This makes finding anything on your find quick and painless, as well as dialing phone numbers, visiting websites or just searching for information online.

Gesture Area

Another excellent, innovative feature. The solution to the back/forward button problem, now with no buttons! But the gesture area is so much more than that. Context menus, shortcuts, advanced gestures. What better way to put that dead space beneath your screen to better use?

Multitasking

True, real, multitasking. Multitasking, done the right way. This isn’t a cheap trick in multitasking. Applications actually run fully in the background and switching between each application is seamless. Best of all, closing an application actually closes it. Hands down the best multitasking experience on any mobile OS.

Notifications

The unobtrusive notification system along with the complete and total control the user has over individual notifications makes this notification system the best out of any mobile OS out there.

5. Devices

Ok, this doesn’t really have much to do with the OS but no one likes a phone with a really nice OS running on mediocre hardware. The build quality of most Android devices is solid. The Nexus One for example is very sexy, sturdy and feels really great in your palm and pocket.

4. Popularity

Google’s increasing popularity in the Mobile smartphone race is a huge plus. Many companies are racing to push out quality apps to the market and it’s that increasing popularity that brings in quality content to the phones. We already know it has nothing to do with the SDK thanks to Apple’s painful developer un-friendly SDK.

3. Widgets

Widgets are really cool! I wish other platforms had this feature. It feels really good to personalize your phone and having a couple of home screens to put whatever you want on it seems like a no-brainer to me.

2. Apps

The great apps on the market, although few, are excellent. It’s nice to have a dedicated Tumblr app, one from Foursquare, a very nice Flixster app, Grooveshark, etc. And the Google apps are incredible like Sky Maps, Voice, Goggles, Latitude, and Voice Search. Google is definitely king in creating the best apps.

1. Speed

I appreciate Google’s love for optimizing their software for speed.

It’s the only reason I switched from Firefox to Chrome — their V8 Javascript engine is the best (hint: make Chrome for Android) and they are always looking to improve upon it. And that’s why it makes #1 on this list — Froyo (2.2) had a 450% performance boost from 2.1’s Eclair and it runs buttery smooth on the Nexus One’s 1GHz Snapdragon, from the smooth transitions and animations to something simple like loading up an app.