I'm pretty sure if people are vocal enough about such an easy change then Palm will respond fairly quickly.

http://www.palmpreforum.org This is all about the plam pre

Think they really are the same? Try running Pandora while navigating on the iPhone.

Or try going back to the contact you last worked with after you looked something up on the web.

These aren't exotic examples of what you might expect to do on a PDA.

I'm not trying to knock the iPhone. I think it is a great phone. But Apple has some catching up to do with WebOS. The notification feature of the iPhone is not a very good substitute for running multiple apps concurrently.

All of which is to say: The pre is no me-too phone.

But it is very important that lots of apps get written for the new machine. And one of the factors that determines how many apps are written for it is how easy it is to develop for it. I think that javascript/html/css is a pretty smart choice. Objective C has a steep learning curve, and the number of apps that crash on startup is a testament to that fact.

Remember youtube videos and the techcrunch article where the guy talked about how he made youtube videos go viral and that requires a lot of people posting links on forums and what not to reach a critical mass? So yes, social media and WOM and all that can help spread the word of a product thats truly
remarkable (Seth Godin talks a lot about this) but you need to invest money in distribution – and for iphone thats more of an art compared to Facebook which is more of a science.

Also what about platforms such as openfeint within iPhone? that might help eh? Palm will never have the community iPhone will.

thanks again for the smarting read!

That being said, I see no reason a new web developer should learn php. Ruby or python (esp. with a good framework) are much better choices

Why is this so, and remembering that it was their success that has pushed the browser platform forward and not vice versa? The ease of iteration on the web was originally not because of ease of development, but of deployment.

App stores and OTA updates have made deployment trivial, whether on the iPhone or the Pre. What's left is the ease of development in a dynamic language and a an army of developers that will have a short ramp up time to start developing for the Pre. If Palm can capitalize on that it has a shot at succeeding.

I really think it's more about perception and how games and other high end software shift that perception of the device. I'm already seeing articles like this one:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2348658,00...

From the article:

“This is not a subtle distinction, either. Apple has evolved the iPhone in ways that we could not have imagined when it came out two years ago. The new OS 3.0 games are 3D in nature and provide a rich game experience similar to that on a PC. Games on other smartphones are weak by comparison.”

…

“It's unfair to Palm to ask whether the Pre is an iPhone killer. In fact, even trying to put it in the same class as the iPhone is dooming it to failure. The Pre and others are excellent smartphones, but they're phones, not PC platforms. “

Not good. They are basically putting the Pre into the toy category while the iPhone gets put into the pocket computer category. You and I know that both devices have very similar hardware (I believe the CPU and GPU are actually the same or very similar).

We're going to see more and more of this chasm between full featured desktop class operating systems running on mobile hardware and everyone else. Apple clearly has a desktop OS running at the heart of the iPhone. I don't know enough about Palm's WebOS to know where it falls but the media is starting to make the call based on what they see (or don't see) running on the devices. As an aside, Microsoft is at a cross-roads with Windows Mobile. In my opinion, Microsoft really should move away from a seperate code base and put a trimmed down version of Windows 7 on mobile hardware. Of course, I'm not sure how you would support all of the existing software written for Windows Mobile 6.5 and lower (VM maybe?). Then there's the cost to retool the development pipeline. Sounds complicated, which is why the momentum and excellent development tools that gave Windows Mobile an advantage in the past is likely one of the things holding it back from making the necessary transition away from the WinCE core.

In any case, it will be a very interesting generation of devices. As a note, I use a Palm Pre as my primary device and despite the somewhat flaky build quality (everything is loose – it feels like it will explode into atoms if I drop it), I love it.

-Vance

I've surveyed the applications I most use on my G1 and could not think of one not suitable for webOS development. The issue of games elludes me as I'm not a gamer, I mostly read and communicate using these devices.

I do wonder about networking and graphics programming on webOS but, excluding games and VoIP (which carriers resent), how much is left that's not possible in mobile applications?