Developers Gather at Palm Pre Dev Camps
Two months after the Palm Pre handheld smart phone shipped, software programmers worldwide attended developer camps in more than 80 cities.
Analysts say the fate of Palm rests on the success of the Pre, which while popular, still faces an uphill challenge against Apple's iPhone and Research in Motion's Blackberry platforms. Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows Mobile will likely gain more momentum in the coming months. Nevertheless Palm popularized smart phones years back with its PalmOS-based Treo, but failed to keep that platform up to date as rivals moved in.
The PreDevCamp events, conceived earlier this year by developer evangelists looking to help Palm's webOS platform get off the ground, took place Saturday August 8th. They were the subject of conflict among the organizers of the dev camp and Palm when the company appeared reluctant to commit to participating in the independent event. After the Pre was released in June, some of the organizers moved on and the event was postponed for two months, awaiting the widespread release of the SDK. Palm ultimately endorsed the event.
In a pre-recorded welcome on the predevcamp site, Palm CTO Mitch Allen welcomed attendees and announced that tens of thousands of developers have downloaded the SDK since it was released last month and that 2.5 million applications were downloaded from the company's App Catalog. "At Palm we are eagerly anticipating the innovations that you and your fellow developers will create using this platform," he said.
"I think the whole thing was a success, it exceeded any of the expectations that I had earlier this year when we all started this endeavor," said Dan Rumney, global support manager with IBM, who was the founding organizer of the event. In Austin, Texas, where Rumney is based, only 10 developers attended. But other cities such as San Diego, New York, Seattle, Los Angles, Dallas and Kansas City, had healthy turnouts, Rumney said. "We seeded some local user groups which I anticipate will get together again and communicate on future occasion," Rumney said.
Chuq Von Rospach, community manager for Palm, gave a presentation in San Diego that was streamed, Rumney said. Von Rospach said Palm wants to learn from some mistakes Apple has made with its App Store such as offering 99 cent applications, Rumney recalled. "People who have the tendency to kind of flood the catalog with cheap applications in an attempt to get high volume sales, and I think Palm is going to try to avoid that," Rumney said. "I don't know how they are going to do that but that was his stated goal."
Rumney said key questions were unanswered such as the future of the API and when developers will be able to take more control of the hardware. "There were a lot of questions about the future of the SDK and the pieces of them, and the webOS that he couldn’t answer, but to be quite frank that's not surprising," Rumney said.
About the Author
Jeffrey Schwartz is executive editor of Redmond Channel Partner and an editor-at-large at Redmond magazine. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreySchwartz.