Palm's fallen mobile operating system webOS seems to reborn as LuneOS, thanks to a project that targets mobile devices. Official support from HP for the webOS devices ended in Jan. 2012 with the release of webOS 3.0.5. Now there's some fresh material thanks to the Open webOS Project.

WebOS is now sponsored by LG Electronics, which bought the OS in Feb. 2013 to use as a Smart TV platform. But webOS developers are also allowed to bring new open source webOS builds to mobile devices.

In Jan. 2013, a build of "Open webOS" (OWOS 1.0) launched as an aftermarket ROM for the Nexus 7. WebOS Ports, a companion group of the Open WebOS project, announced the Alpha 2 release back in June of 2013.

Today, the group's latest release to the community is the "LuneOS". Lune is the French translation of moon and refers to the user interface met in legacy webOS, LunaSysMgr, which is named after the Latin/Spanish translation of moon.

The release model for LuneOS is a rolling one where each of the releases will get its own name from a list of coffee beverages. This first release is "Affogato".

All work for each release is visible to the public and users can also update to unreleased stages to support the developers with testing and bug fixing.

As a mobile operating system, LuneOS is tailored for smartphones and tablets.
Although it is not a competitor OS to Android or iOS. It should satisfy basic needs in the mobile environment.

LuneOS currently supports the Nexus 4 and HP TouchPad. The Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 7 (2012 Wifi) are still supported with this Affogato release, but will not be actively maintained anymore by the project team for future releases.

LuneOS curently has a working settings app which includes things like wifi, screen, developer mode, and about. Apps that work include a basic browser, Preware, mail, accounts, memos is fully working, a stubbed contacts app, initial calendar app with no real backend functionality yet, synergy connectors for a lot of endpoints (Google, Yahoo, i*, owncloud, and more) and initial work for a phone app. Also, contacts sync is working along with better suspend/resume handling, and a bunch of other smaller things.

Starting with this release, LuneOS has a built-in update mechanism which makes it easy for users to update to the latest build.

The just released launch build of LuneOS is available for the Nexus 4 and HP TouchPad. The Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 7 (2012 Wi-Fi-edition) are also supported, but will not receive ongoing support with future releases.

The project borrowed Android's telephony system and graphics drivers. The developers plan to later integrate Android's open source camera and sensor drivers, as well as Android's open source hardware-accelerated video decoding packages.

More information is available here