Palm’s impeding Nova announcement doesn’t leave the Palm OS faithful cold – after having heard from Infinity Softworks before, it’s now Hobbyist Software’s turn!
Rob Jonson, the CEO of the company, states the following in a private email to yours truly:
Palm will presumably announce Nova at CES. At that point, they just need to have it working and have some demo apps. After they have done the big announcement without leaks in advance to the press, then they’ll pass out simulator, sdks, etc to developers.
There is bound to be a biggish gap between CES and devices reaching consumers, so that’s the time they’ll start bringing in the developers.
If they do it right (pre-release devices to top developers) then there is no reason why there shouldn’t be a good selection of apps when the devices launch.
And of course, the big difference that Palm will be banking on is that they’ll be able to support 90% of existing Palm OS Garnet apps from day 1 through some sort of emulator.
The big question for Palm isn’t ‘will the developers be ready’ the big question is ‘how will they get customers excited about something that isn’t an iPhone’
if Palm gets customers excited, you can be sure that developers will follow.
fwiw, my answer to that would be
1) gps that can do turn by turn directions out of the box
2) different form factors (keyboard)
3) more open platform allowing apps to interact, run in background,3 is the weakest sell as it requires a bunch of advertising/pr to explain to users why they should care, and what type of apps they can have now that they can’t have on the iPhone.
Image: Wikimedia Commomns / NASA et ESA
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