It seems he pulled off the trick by using the WebOS emulator image (which works on x86 processors) and putting it on an IDE hard drive (not the newer SATA standards).
Now, instead of WebOS running on a virtual machine, it is running on a real machine, says the source.
The forum users does say there are four glaring problems still:
1) handle interface issue (touchscreen/gesture area, faux mouse... not to mention the accelerometer issue)
2) drivers. seeing as it's running on top of an x86 kernel... maybe it's just an issue of running a different kernel with some patches? It's hard to say on this one... it really depends on how much palm patched the underlying kernel.
3) software/gui. The gui doesn't draw right at anything but the native 320x480 / 320x400 resolutions (yet). Will likely require a virtual keyboard of some sort (there's a patch for that already).
4) binary compatibility, for apps that don't use the PDK it's matter of correctly translating the mojo framework calls. PDK based apps aren't going to work at all without being recompiled for an x86 processor (anything that uses PDK now is compiled for ARMv7... I think).
Regardless, it is an interesting experiment and the short video is worth watching.
Written by: Andre Yoskowitz @ 17 May 2010 0:00
