Only in a pre-alpha flavor at the moment, it should see enhancements soon

Oct 10, 2012 07:31 GMT  ·  By

Soon after HP announced the availability of its Open webOS platform, Galaxy Nexus has received its own share of the operating system, in the form of a fairly unusable port.

However, it appears that things have started to move in the right direction, and that the port is seeing enhancements that might finally lead to it being ready for everyday use.

The latest enhancement brought to the platform on Galaxy Nexus arrives in the form of a new gesture area, as can be seen in the video embedded at the bottom of this article.

For those out of the loop, we should note that Galaxy Nexus was made available with no buttons on the front, but with soft navigation keys, which occupy some of its screen when active.

Thus, the gesture area on Open webOS 1.0 replaces those keys and should make the platform usable with one hand, although Galaxy Nexus could work just fine without it, webosnation notes.

At the moment, the feature is only in pre-alpha stage, which means that there still is a wide range of fixes and enhancements to be brought to it.

In fact, it should be noted that there is no back gesture available for the time being, yet Tom King, chief of WebOS Ports (which brought the platform to Galaxy Nexus) notes that the team is currently working on the matter.

The code for the new gesture area is not available as of yet, which does not come too much as a surprise, given the fact that the software is still in its early stages of development.

The good news, however, is that things have started to work, and that the new platform appears to be compatible with last year’s Google phone. This also suggests that other devices might get a taste of it at some point in the future.

For the time being, however, we can only admire the Open webOS on Galaxy Nexus in the video below, but keep an eye on this space for more info on the mater.