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Wow, will people still have Pre's in the Summer?
because of palms stupidity no one will be using this. palm should of released the sdk before the phone came out so by the time the pre was released developers would have almost been finished with their apps and the consumer wouldn't have to wait months just to have third party apps. this phone is pretty much dead now because average people are going to complain that this phone doesn't have any apps and a negative stigma is going to form around it .for christ sake even the g1 had more apps on its opening day (50 apps)
I don't know, I don't see the limited number of initial apps to be a huge issue for me (am grabbing a Pre the second it becomes available on the everything plus referral program).
I've played with the phone for a total of about 2 hours in Sprint stores at this point, and the core features of the phone are enough to make it a smart and useful purchase for me. Unlimited everything on the sprint plan, GPS nav, awesome calendar and sync features... that's a pretty good core system if you ask me.
If the phone were simply an operating system and a dialer, then I would see the urgency for 3rd party applications (sort of like Windows Mobile). If people just want to play a bunch of games on their phone, they should be looking at the iPhone or a handheld gaming system.
I think the Pre will succeed with people like me. I'm a huge PC gamer, but I don't need to be playing games every waking minute on every device I own. Plus I want an alternative to the iPhone plan that does the same things (and in some areas does it better), and costs much less to boot.
I don't know how many of "me" there are out there, but I suppose we'll find out when we see how many Pres Palm sells in the first year.
@Jay Jay
Android was an open source project everyone had access to for over 2 years. WebOS was not. Of course Palm couldn't release the SDK when the damn OS wasn't even finished yet.
@Joshua
Did you bother to read Palm's announcement? Because if you did you would have read that Palm is releasing the beta SDK to THOUSANDS of developers in the next couple of weeks. Development for WebOS is hardly coming to a standstill, but I guess according to you, we should all abandon hope and go with OSX or Android.
Again, what a dick.
I'm so shocked the hypocritical Apple Fanbois are calling this a death wish for Palm. I think Palm users can do without their farting apps until the end of summer.
dude. give palm a break.
it took apple forever to release the sdk after the iphone was released into the wild.
an sdk later this summer for the Pre is very reasonable.
@ jay jay
I just want to add that this fascination with Apps ever since Apple released 2.0 OS is ridiculous. Besides games, most apps are just a slightly fancier version of the Web site that already exists. In some cases, like with ESPN, I find the Web site to be a better alternative to the app that compliments it.
Also, the Pre has always had a more business centered approach. It was pretty clear that it wants to grab back the old Palm Pilot crowd, not necessarily the crowd whose first smart phone was the iPhone. These two demographics have two very different sets of needs/wants, and I don't think having a huge SDK available for business apps, is going to kill sales immediately.
To the critics here -- no one wants to see Palm and webOS succeed more than I do. I think it's a great platform, and it's nice that they're opening the early SDK up to more devs, but what they really need is something offer to everyone who wants to participate.
The phone is out now, webOS is out now, and it needs software flowing. If you had a Pre, you would know that it's been days and days since a single new app has popped up in the App Catalog. That is disheartening for end-users.
"I'm so shocked the hypocritical Apple Fanbois are calling this a death wish for Palm. I think Palm users can do without their farting apps until the end of summer."
It's amazing isnt it?
Their phone of choice had no SDK for a year after it was released, and that was no biggie for them.
But what amounts to a couple of months for the Pre? "no one is going to use it by then! This is the death of the Pre!!!!!"
As much as they like to act so snotty and pretend like all the other phone platforms are supposedly so bad, they seem desperate to smear this one.
@Joshua
Sorry for calling you a dick. Twice. However:
You're title is misleading as hell. Palm isn't releasing the SDK PUBLICLY for a couple of months, but they say in THAT VERY SAME STATEMENT YOU QUOTED they are releasing it to THOUSANDS of select developers over the next couple of weeks. The title of your post and encouragement for developers to look elsewhere sounds like you really don't want Palm, the Pre or WebOS to succeed.
Please edit your post to tell the ACTUAL story. Thanks.
@darkstar
Last year, Apple had no competition sorta speak. Right now, Palm is facing tough competition between Apple and Android-based phones for developers. Delaying the release of the SDK for 3 months is almost a death sentence for the Palm Pre.
Good luck Palm Pre ...you need it.
Why do some choose to be ignorant? As some have said, the original iphone did not have an SDK until almost a year after it launched. Also, RIMM sold 3.5 million units in their last quarter, "RIMM is seriously lacking (according to you Apple fanatics) when is comes to an app-store", if that's the case, how is it that RIMM outsells Apple?!?
@p3t3b2
Um, because Blackberry has brand equity? It's a known and established brand, especially in the enterprise sector? It's called Crackberry for a reason.
The Palm Pre? Not so much.
@Joshua
Thank you for editing your story. I don't suppose it would be too much to ask to edit the title, too?
"Palm says no public webOS SDK till end of Summer"
That's a little more accurate. Again, thanks for the edit.
Thanks, Palm, for giving the iPhone even more of a lead. By the end of the summer the App Store should be up to 60,000 apps. I agree that Palm developers should have more patience, but the smartphone race is going hot and heavy in the Apps department since almost everyone and their mother opened up a corporate app store. I don't think they should slap a "beta" tag on it just to get it out either. It's not just the number of apps, but developers don't want to sit around waiting and are definitely going to go to Apple and maybe they won't come back to Palm. Two or three months isn't a long time, but things change so fast in the cellphone world.
How dare they not have the SDK ready on day 1!! They're making us wait two whole months?! The nerve! This is egregious!! Egregious I say! They should have followed Apple's lead and had the SDK out on day 1!!!
Oh, wait...
Seriously, people need to calm down. They're releasing a polished SDK by the end of summer and in the meantime they're giving you source code. Meaning you can do much more than web-based apps right now, for free. People are never happy...
I think you guys are missing the big point. When Apple released their SDK, they had no effective competition in the App market. When PALM release their SDK, the iPhone will have 80,000 apps. They're averaging 10,000 apps a month right now. They have 40 million users for their platform. They may have as many as 5 million more users by the time PALM's SDK comes out. And they're about to release the iPhone in China.
PALM should of had this SDK out from day one.
And really, come on. If you really wanted to be one of the first to use the beta SDK, you could have signed up to be a beta developer like I did. It was on their website for months.
Also, you don't think that the instant that SDK is out, someone isn't going to leak it to the outside world? Come on now.
@Paul
What's the point of using a web-based phone like the iPhone in a country like China that has the Great Firewall of China. Government-approved apps only.
And the last time I checked, the iPhone was doing poorly in technology-rich countries like Japan. They're having to give it away free, and even then, people are more willing to buy a feature-centric phone vs. a phone that is a "jack of all trades, master of none". This has been well-documented.
It's all about market size.. Apple was smart to wait until the iPhone market was large enough for it to be worth to develop on. With Palm though it will never be anywhere near the size of the Apple market when the iPhone came out... so really when they come out with it is irrelevant, as it won't be worth the resources to develop on anyways. Maybe block out Pre's from your javascript based web apps and sell them in the app catalog.. that is the only thing that would be worth it.
@ Darkstar,
What break is there to give. Apple had never done a phone, Palm has a long history of phones. While WebOS is new, like iPhone OS X is new the SDKs are quite different in scale. Palm has yet to announce an SDK with rich APIs that tie into the HW, so far they are just HTML5 DB pages using the Apple-funded WebKit. We’re talking about an SDK for making local webpages in HTML, JS and CSS. Not exactly the same thing.
The problem that many have with Palm, myself included, is not how Palm did so well in marketing and developing a media-rich smartphone that targeted the areas that iPhone did not, but how they dropped the ball with a release date right before the well rumoured iPhone announcement. This is especially troubling when they had too many issues to work out, including the lack of an SDK. They would have been better off to release the device a few months on either end of the iPhone announcement and after it was a more complete package. Despite having a much better CPU, GPU, double the RAM of the original iPhone and uses a much lighter, simpler OS it still gets beat in many performance tests because it’s not well optimized.
I want Palm to be contender again, and it annoys me that they are dropping the ball so late in the game. Luckily, I bought stock back in January after the announcement so I’m okay. I’ll probably be selling next week after I get to 14x my investment.
As for your “took forever” comment, Apple announced the SDK was coming in October 2007 and stated a release date of February 2008. They released on March 6th. I don’t think 6 days is really the same delay as Palm’s webcode SDK.
There's no trophy for "fast SDK release." It doesn't matter how slowly or quickly the SDK hits. What *matters* is what the competition is doing. As long as the Pre is competing with the iPhone and Android, not having an SDK available hurts them. Even if they released the SDK the day the Pre came out, they'd be playing catch up -- the longer they wait, the harder it is, no matter how good the phone.
If they release their SDK 2 days sooner than Apple did (after the release of the iPhone) I don't think saying "but we did it faster than Apple did!!" would appease shareholders.
It just seems so obvious, yet the fanboys are pretending that the only thing that matters is some absurd SDK-release-speed competition.
@UnixSystemsEngineer -- You've put it perfectly. It's important because the platforms they're competing against (and I mean competing for developer mindshare) have established SDKs which anyone can get. It's not about where they are compared to Apple in 2007, it's about where they are compared to Apple / Google / etc. now.
Dear god Paul! I think everyone will agree with me when I say STFU. I agree that the iPhone is a good device, but you take it TOO FAR. If you're just trolling then you've won, you've managed to piss EVERYONE off!
Quality, not quantity.
@Joshua with all the respect, I don't think you are correct. End of summer of 3 months away. How many phones will PALM sell till end of summer? 2 million? 5 million? Do you really think that FART 1, 2, 3 will help to add to this number?
Beta developers are usually people who really care and they are THE developers. A lot of them have the beta SDK now.
How many iPhone Apps (outside Apple apps) do you use daily? my GF has iPhone and with 30 apps downloaded, she plays ONE (thats 1) game.
On a side, this is not a battle you can win in 2 months, RIM sold way more phones in Q1 than Apple in US, NOKIA has still 40%+ of all smartphones and is HUGE in Europe ... what can help more than anything else is GSM version
JimboJones,
You're probably right, but you have to realize how susceptible people are to the language of marketing.
"50,000 apps vs. 13 apps."
It doesn't matter how many fart apps there are, people will look at that and assume that the former is a more important device / they are joining a community of people who like it / more = better.
I can't tell you how many people I run into who are iPhone owners that talk about the "app store" like its the 8th wonder of the world, and "apps" like mobile software is something exclusive and new just for Apple users.
Ultimately I don't care -- people should use what they want to use. I'm just saying that people aren't going to be Palm Pre apologists just because the iPhone has been out longer and has had more time to develop. They will buy what sounds and looks more appealing.
How many people have pasted the full "app store" list on Engadget? If the app store becomes synonymous with mobile software, like Google has become with internet search, competitors are in for a lot of trouble. In some cases you don't have to show that your stuff is better than the competition, only make people think its the ONLY stuff. Not one person in my professional or social life to date has heard of the Palm Pre.
i cannot stop laughing .... this is really a feature I'm not looking for
McDonald's wi-fi (hundreds of thousands)
Summer is such a northern-hemisphere-centric designation!
Also, could everyone please quit with the 'LACKING BECAUSE OF THE FOLLOWING" copypasta? It was annoying enough the first time.