I'm very happy with my Palm Pre. I understand why it hasn't sold as well as they expected, and I agree with all the points you made here, but it's still a great phone. WebOS is a solid, practically flawless platform. I really hope they get it together, because they have a good thing going. They just need to continue to take giant steps forward. Now that development has been opened up to C++, they need to release a second generation phone with better hardware and hopefully that will attract more developers.
Just to get it out of the way: I am a complete Palm Pre / webOS fanboy, so all of this makes me grind my teeth.
Everyone loves to point at the Mojo SDK and dismiss it. But, the fact is 90% of the apps for smartphones can be implemented with it. The remainder, mostly games, can be done now with the native code PDK they're about to release to all developers. It's really not as limiting as it sounds. Having played with iPhone / Android / J2ME / PalmOS, it's a blast in comparison.
And the Luna app environment itself is mostly all viewable HTML/CSS/JS, so it's very customizable / hackable and serves as example code for building apps. Underneath that is a fairly standard embedded Linux distro, running many of the same packages as my Linksys router - unlike Android's weird assemblage of alien technology.
jwz's Kafka-esque nightmare stemmed from the fact he wanted to release open source software for free in an app store that assumed - like Apple's - that developers wanted to make money.
Apple's App Store still works that way, though it seems largely accepted. Palm, on the other hand, responded by recruiting Ben & Dion from Mozilla, who started over from scratch with the App Catalog. Today, jwz could do basically what he wanted to do.
So, all that said... You're totally right. Out of the gate, the hardware quality sucked, the SDK was half-baked, and the ads were bizarre. They've done a lot of right things since launching, but they were all things that should have been done pre-launch.
Of course, then, launch would have been this summer instead of last, and there wouldn't have still been a Palm left to kick around.
I hope they manage to keep it going and release another generation of webOS hardware that's worth, but I'm eyeing up Android devices in case they don't...
It all really reminds me of what Commodore did to the Amiga. Great platform for the time, horrible marketing, killed by a long series of complete boneheaded moves.
Thrax
🐌Austin, TX Icrontian
Comments
Everyone loves to point at the Mojo SDK and dismiss it. But, the fact is 90% of the apps for smartphones can be implemented with it. The remainder, mostly games, can be done now with the native code PDK they're about to release to all developers. It's really not as limiting as it sounds. Having played with iPhone / Android / J2ME / PalmOS, it's a blast in comparison.
And the Luna app environment itself is mostly all viewable HTML/CSS/JS, so it's very customizable / hackable and serves as example code for building apps. Underneath that is a fairly standard embedded Linux distro, running many of the same packages as my Linksys router - unlike Android's weird assemblage of alien technology.
jwz's Kafka-esque nightmare stemmed from the fact he wanted to release open source software for free in an app store that assumed - like Apple's - that developers wanted to make money.
Apple's App Store still works that way, though it seems largely accepted. Palm, on the other hand, responded by recruiting Ben & Dion from Mozilla, who started over from scratch with the App Catalog. Today, jwz could do basically what he wanted to do.
So, all that said... You're totally right. Out of the gate, the hardware quality sucked, the SDK was half-baked, and the ads were bizarre. They've done a lot of right things since launching, but they were all things that should have been done pre-launch.
Of course, then, launch would have been this summer instead of last, and there wouldn't have still been a Palm left to kick around.
I hope they manage to keep it going and release another generation of webOS hardware that's worth, but I'm eyeing up Android devices in case they don't...
It all really reminds me of what Commodore did to the Amiga. Great platform for the time, horrible marketing, killed by a long series of complete boneheaded moves.