Just as I wanted to publish an article on the neglect of AddIt, I received the following report from a friend inside PalmGear’s:
wanted to share with you an exclusive first look at the Palm App Store, which launched tonight just in time for the holidays (see below). Over 5,000 apps and games to download. Over 1,000 completely free apps. Incredible apps such as Facebook, Nursing Central and Encyclopedia Brittanica, and awesome games such as Pac-Man, Tetris, and Fish Tycoon. Supporting more than 25 Palm devices, from the Centro to the Treo Pro. Palm has shipped well over 50 million mobile devices to date.
You can download the free Palm App Store here :: http://software.palm.com/appstore
More than 1,500 developers have already submitted apps to the Palm App Store — developers can add their titles here :: http://software.palm.com/appstore/developers
Talk to you soon,
Visiting the URL reveals the following web site – it looks like Palm now has a new on-device application store in place for both Windows Mobile and Palm OS:
On my Treo 680, the app store itself is realized via Blazer: all the 6k app does is open a special URL with the on-device web browser:
Products can be purchased OTA: unfortunately, clicking the buy it now button on my Treo 680 currently does nothing:
Compared to the former AddIt solution, PocketGears app store has benefits and disadvantages. AddIt was an extremely fat program which had a local database: while this sped up searching and browsing, it made the program require heavy update downloads every now and then (containing data nobody ever needs). PocketGear’s solution is light-weight, but slower – launching Blazer alone takes up to 10 seconds.
I am currently pursuing further information for developers (and a quote from AddIt) – stay tuned for further info as we get it!
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I remember the days when people would take the extra time to say “application” in full. Look what you’ve done to us, apple :-p