Posts Tagged ‘PhoneGap’

The rumors were correct – Palm announced the Pre at CES on January 9, 2009. Certainly, as announceware, it hits a lot of high notes in terms of hardware design and usability – both factors Palm has always been noted for. But let’s credit Apple here – the iPhone got Palm out of the one-track design mind we’ve seen in recent Palm phone and PDA models.

More importantly – and I believe critically for Palm’s chance of success with this device – Palm also announced that operating system code-name Nova is actually WebOS, based on the same Web 2.0 precepts we see in the application models on Google’s Android and Apple’s iPhone OS. Palm’s calling their SDK Mojo. This promises a greater degree of application portability than we’ve seen on mobile phones (though, of course, this model is limited to smartphones now). Still, it must be said that despite a pretty broad adherence to standards (particularly, HTML5) across WebOS, Android and Apple, it’s still very early days to judge cross-platform portability.

Brighthand has a comprehensive article on WebOS here.

Tantalizingly, Palm discussed additional, non standards-based, features in WebOS/Mojo which target bringing PalmOS-like capabilities to web-based applications. Specifically, a notification system (theoretically supporting push-type applications) and a JSON-based message bus (which sounds suspiciously familiar to the PalmOS brand of inter-application communication). It will be interested to see if Palm opts to migrate these services to open source or standards.

Boy Genius Report has a nice gallery of demonstration screens constructed with MoJo, by the way. Developers will note the non-visual similarities to Apple’s eponymous widget set. However, one clear innovation is WebOS’s unique visual paradigm Palm is calling cards. It will be interested to see how cards map to applications in real (developer) life – again questions about portability arise.

And what of old-style PalmOS applications? Palm has not expanded on this topic too much, but indicates on it’s developer site that PalmOS application data will be migratable to WebOS applications.