Palm’s new webOS has been praised for not coming across as an iPhone OS X derivative, and in today’s smartphone ecosystem that’s a pretty impressive achievement.  Watching our video from CES 2009 last week, though, together with the wealth of Pre content that’s now online, Pre Community was reminded of something one of our sibling sites, Phone Magazine, saw all the way back in February 2008.  NVIDIA were demonstrating their then-new APX 2500 reference design, complete with a demo software development environment, the array of “cards” - each live, and representing a running app – bears a striking similarity in appearance and concept to webOS’ own task manager.

Check out the NVIDIA APX 2500 demo video after the cut

The NVIDIA reference device, intended to showcase the 720p HD-capable APX 2500, is based on Windows CE and never intended for actual production.  Similarly the software and GUI, coded in OpenGL ES 2.0, was designed to illustrate how the chipset could multitask numerous applications, running each of them either full-screen or as smaller preview windows.

Now we’re not saying that webOS is a straight-up copy of the NVIDIA design, but it’s interesting to see the same GUI concept being carried from a prototype to an ostensibly unconnected production device.  The Pre uses an ARM Cortex A8-based OMAP 3 processor with what Texas Instruments call “laptop type processing”; we’d be interested to see webOS running on the APX 2500, which uses an ARM11 750MHz CPU, complete with its ability to drive video to an external 60-inch HDTV.

NVIDIA APX 2500 reference design:

Palm Pre hands-on at CES 2009: