Palm takes next steps on webOS, Pre smartphone

Palm has revealed new details about its developer plans for the webOS operating system, the heart of the upcoming Palm Pre smartphone.

The company has extended its "early access" program for the Mojo software development kit, making it accessible to more developers, but still stopping short of general availability. Palm also announced plans to deploy the first of a series of branded "cloud" services, in this case a subscribe/publish messaging service. Finally, it unveiled an emulation program from MotionApps, that will let the Palm Pre load and run hundreds of applications written for the legacy PalmOS platform.

The announcements were made Wednesday night by Michael Abbott, Palm senior vice president of application software and services, during a speech and demonstration at the Web 2.0 Expo, in San Francisco.

Among other things, Abbott stressed that webOS applications run natively on the Palm Pre, so they"re available to users even without a network connection. But those applications are built with widely-used Web technologies such as HMTL, JavaScript, and Cascading Style Sheets. The new platform, which replaces the declining PalmOS, is critical to Palm"s future.

Since shortly after the sleek, multi-touch Pre smartphone was unveiled in January, the Mojo SDK has been available only to a select group of software application partners. Starting now, developers can apply for access to the toolkit at http://developer.palm.com. Not all applicants will be accepted at this point. Mojo will be generally released "later this year," according to Palm.

The smartphone, initially available only on the Sprint network, is due out by the end of June at the latest. You can check out a slideshow that compares Palm Pre with Apple iPhone, based on their specifications. 

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