I’m here at the Palm Pre VIP lounge at the 2009 CES, where they’re serving up delicious coffee drinks and doing demos for developers. I got to ask a bunch of questions that Palm CEO Ed Colligan didn’t answer during his Pre press conference, and wanted to pass along the answers.
The Pre will have an app store, Palm reps confirmed. They’re not saying anything about the revenue share, but you’ll buy apps through an on-device app store.
Colligan said that apps for Pre were written in Javascript, HTML and CSS, which I found suspicious. Folks here at the lounge confirmed that there will be a software developers’ kit to let developers access core Pre features, and that it will be called “Mojo.” Just not yet. I did, though, talk to one of their early third-party developers, who said that everything he did before in Visual Studio he could do in Javascript on the Pre.
Going into a little more detail on Mojo, Palm folks said they’ll have a set of APIs to let Javascript programmers hit hardware features that aren’t commonly touched in Javascript apps. Will you be able to do everything – such as write to the frame buffer? No, but you’ll get access to all of the phone’s databases, unlike on the iPhone. So if you wanted to, say, write a way to integrate MySpace into the contact book, that would be possible.
Palm even said that a third party could write a Palm OS emulator for webOS, which tells me they must have some funky Javascript APIs indeed.
The WebKit-based Web browser supports streaming video in RTSP, H. 263 and H.264 formats, but doesn’t support Flash … yet. But I spoke to two Palm employees both of whom smirked when I mentioned Flash, which made me think they’re talking to Adobe right now. The browser also doesn’t have a name, though Palm will release specs soon for developers who want to make sure their sites work on the browser.
How do you sync it with Outlook without an Exchange server? They’re not saying, but it looks like it will be possible.
How about music and video? You can drag and drop it over from your PC using USB Mass Storage, or buy songs on the device using a built in Amazon MP3 Store client.
Read more about the Pre in my full story on PCMag.com.
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