However, the sad part still prevails, Palm is still into losses, as the operating costs are higher than expected. During the conference call following the presentation of the results, Palm CEO Rubinstein also announced that Palm will completely abandon Windows Mobile in favor of the webOS, which was pretty expected to encourage the WebOS  platform.

The numbers, everyone was waiting for, were the number of Pre smartphones the company had sold during this quarter, but this question was not answered – at least NOT directly. They only gave the total number of smartphones sold: 823000, up 134% from last quarter’s 351000 units, but a 30% decrease over the same quarter last year.

During previous quarter, Palm sold 350000 smartphones. Reports indicate that about 70,000 of those were Pres stuck in channel, i.e. 2,80,000 non-Pre smartphones were sold last quarter.

With the Press release, Palm mentions a decrease in demand for legacy products, so let’s take a conservative decline of 10% over the first quarter. This means that Palm sold 8,23,000 – 2,50,000 = 5,73,000 Pre’s. This is well above the estimates of most analysts, but obviously bear in mind that this is just an educated guess.

CNet quoted:

But even though sales of the Pre were strong, Palm still ended up losing $164.5 million, or $1.17 per share in its fiscal first quarter. Still, the company’s losses beat analyst expectations. Excluding items, the company posted a loss of 10 cents a share. Analysts had predicted a loss of 25 cents a share, according to Reuters.

With sales of Pres this quarter coming mostly from a single carrier in a single country, this isn’t all that bad. The Pre has been launched in Canada too now, and Europe is right around the corner, as is the holiday season and the launch of the Pixi.

While Palm will continue to sell the current crop of Windows Mobile-based Treo devices, all R&D will be focussed on the webOS, and all future products will use the webOS.

Palm’s sales declined to $68 million. But on a non-GAAP basis, revenue came in at $360.7 million. Wall Street analysts had predicted between $289 million and $297 million.
source: Osnews

The group attracted fairly large no. of interested developers. More than 2000 developers had signed up for the PreDevCamps.

PreDevCamp was organized by Dan Rumney, Greg Stevenson and Lisa Brewster. The volunteer, non-profit group is not affiliated with Palm or with the official Palm Developer Network. Sponsors currently include: BlueSwitch, PreCentral, O’Reilly, Zanox, and Adobe, with additional support from LittleSprings Design, Pivotal Labs and UE Architects.

The Group intended to stimulate the creative juices of attendees by exploring what’s involved in writing applications for Palm’s innovative webOS, migrating existing mobile and Linx applications to the new platform, and testing and optimizing them.

Presentations and hackathons reviewed the process of designing and building mobile apps for the Pre smartphone, using Palm’s Mojo software development kit, and a battery of traditional Web development tools.

Attendees included large variety of developers – mobile application developers, Web programmers, GUI designers and others, most often working together in groups, sharing the experience of programming for webOS. All attendees were encouraged to work on at least one development project, in one of five main application areas: media, communications, games, productivity and reference tools, and system utilities.

Palm’s webOS is powered with an embedded opensource Webkit engine with a multi-tasking Linux kernel, which lets developers use JavaScript, HTML and Cascading Style Sheets to create native applications that run on the Pre smartphone. Early developers working with the Mojo SDK were impressed with the speed of development and the sophistication of the applications. This hardware platform is very similar to iPhone 3G S. But the latter is more capable in graphics.

Out of the 80 cities, major events were in San Francisco (Palm’s headquarters), Kansas City (headquarters for Sprint), San Diego, and Dallas. But others were scattered around the globe, from Athens to Zurich, including Budapest, Ho Chi Minh City, Mumbai, Nairobi, Singapore, and Taipei. Attendance is likely to vary widely, from a bare handful in some cases to scores in others.

The event was modeled on the typical Barcamp phenomenon, participatory groups of computer users and programmers who create and present their own content. The first BarCamp was August 19-21, 2005 in Palo Alto, California, which was organized in less than a week.

Five hundred copies of the Palm webOS development guide, written by Palm’s software chief technology officer Mitch Allen are being provided to the PreDevCamps by Palm and O’Reilly Media, the book’s publisher.

You can get wikis, Forums, IRC, discussion over the PreDevCamp website.

Palm CTO Mitch Allen was excited about this event, he had sent this video to encourage developers at the camp.

Now, a developer has played around with Palm pre to develop an application called My Tether, that allows you to convert your Palm Pre into a Wifi router, with tethering enabled, to share Internet (3G) connection with any number of Wi-fi enabled device.

It’s by no means official but its possible to do it  but one Palm Pre tweaker offers up a step-by-step guide to switching the smartphone into a 3G-fed, open access Wi-Fi hotspot.

The process involves downloading his custom build software, applying patches with root access to the Pre’s OS, and a few other steps one should pay pretty close attention to. That said, the end result is Wi-Fi access for any number of devices you feel comfortable splitting a cellular connection between.

Here are the 8 Easy Steps -

1. Install Java JRE 6 and Virtual Box.

2. Next, you need Pre SDK. If you don’t already have it, Register & Download Pre SDK from Palm.com

3. Download novaterm1.zip and unzip it into your sdk/bin directory.  For Windows, C:\Program Files\Palm\SDK\bin.

4. In Palm Pre Type “upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbastart” in the Launcher area where you can see all the apps. Once you do that, you will see a Developer Mode Enabler menu pop up like this: (on right)

Tap and enable it, and the pre will ask to reset the phone, say yes when prompted and wait till it resets.

5. Now open Novaterm that you downloaded in step 3

Novaterm uses files from Palm Pre SDK. Open windows command prompt i.e. RUN >cmd and change directory to C:\Program Files\Palm\SDK\bin or equivalent in your case.

Now, connect your phone to your computer to USB. When connected, execute this:

novacom -t open tty://

This opens a Telnet session to your Palm Pre. As a result, you should get a terminal prompt: root@castle:/#

Now you have the root access to your Palm Pre Linux OS

6. Next, Execute the command:

wget -qO- http://mytether.net/install.php | /bin/sh

What is that? This is a simple linux command that will automate task of download and installation of MyTether. This should take around a minute or two, depending n your internet connection. When done, it will return back to the original prompt.

7. Now, My Tether is installed and should be available in the Launcher. Launch the app and Enable tethering by clicking the top-right button to ON. After it is switched ON, App will ask you if you want DHCP to be turned on – Choose yes.

8. You are almost done. Now all you have to do is to goto your PC/other Wifi enabled Gadgets and try to connect to Wi-Fi router with SSID “AoNet”.

Don’t hesitate in connecting multiple devices at the same time, it will work.

Enjoy your Tethered 3G services while on the move. Share it with others.

Check this video from palmprehacks.com

Palm is the most developer friendly mobile environment I have ever seen. Previously we mentioned Palm says, Feel Free to Jailbreak Palm Pre. That was the best example of why this is something different from what we have seen in the past. What’s more? Palm Pre MOJO SDK is very powerful and yet welcoming.

After all the reviews and opinions, I fell, The Pre isn’t a bad phone, but it’s simply not worth the $200 to $250 premium over the BlackBerry Curve, the T-Mobile G1, and the iPhone 3G.

One  close friends grabbed a Pre on June 30th, but it wasn’t until July 16 that I figured out where Pre, and Palm’s WebOS platform, actually fit in the market for professional mobile devices. On July 16, Palm released the SDK for WebOS, a set of tools and documentation that Palm had, inexplicably, withheld.

- Why, I wondered, did Palm want to keep the SDK out of power users’ and developers hands when the WebOS platform was all about the ease with which new applications could be created in JavaScript?

- Isn’t this something similar to what Google is thinking of in Chrome OS?
Is there a Mojo?
By theory, part of WebOS’s appeal is that a Pre user can edit script, HTML, and style sheet files to adapt the device to their liking, and the Web-based approach reached all the way up to the top level of the GUI.

If you look carefully, the idea is same as what Google had be touting about in Chrome OS.

The applications are written in web based languages, and they run inside your OS via browser like engine.

There had been alot of arguments who literally consider the idea of web languages to design applications to be flawed.

Wait a moment, think about it. Your web-based applications will give you certain features which you never imagined you can get –  Portable, Light-Weight & more Open Apps. I liked this idea, not just for individuals, but for broad corporate or organizational deployments of devices. I was OK with the Pre’s consumery feel, knowing it wouldn’t take much effort to clear out the gimmicks that cast a cheap pallor on the phone and make a professional user’s experience uneven.

Palm shipped Pre with a stable of 500 handpicked WebOS developers working under NDA, and Palm expanded the secret developer program twice, and yet, at the six-week mark, Pre’s on-phone App Catalog has not grown beyond 30 apps. Why weren’t these developers, working in easy JavaScript, cranking out all kinds of useful apps?

On the other hand, for other platforms, Web applications are easy to develop. I’m not talking about the handwritten or frameworks like DOJO, what I want you to consider is Toolkits like GWT (Google Web Toolkit). If you have no idea about it’s power, have a look at Google’s upcoming WAVE, which will transform the way you knew about Emails, IM, Social Networking, collaboration.

Going back to the mobile-WebOs platform, Palm’s proprietary WebOS JavaScript SDK, with standards-tracked HTML 5 as it’s being implemented across mobile and desktop browsers. I think that HTML 5, especially as implemented in Apple’s open source WebKit engine, on which WebOS is based, is now credible as a runtime for stand-alone applications. I need to take a hard look at Mojo to see whether and to what extent Palm reinvented the JavaScript application foundation that’s built into post-Safari 3.0 builds of WebKit.

Limitations and Target Market

I hear the silly arguments all the time, web based applications can never be as Graphic-Rich and powerful as Native-Desktop apps. I know that. It’s never a war between Desktop and web-based applications. IT’s about getting a new market, that we don’t have today. A new scope that will encourage a “Normal user” to use the applications more openly and freely with higher portability leveraging the Cloud-computing.

What does a normal user/business user need?

Email, IM, Docs, spreadsheets, Multimedia: HD Video, audio, Web tools, normal-graphics-games.

All that is possible via WebOS like Chrome OS. If you havent seen the Graphics magic in AJAX applications, have a look at ChromeExperiments. (works good only in Chrome). Future could be something like Nvidia TEGRA netbooks running Chrome OS. you ever thought about that? A low powered though highly capable Netbook running a Open Web OS, making battery life no longer an issue.

Open the World – Open The Gates
The Mojo SDK is all about creating, installing, and debugging locally hosted Web apps. But an unexpected part of the SDK kicks Pre into Developer Mode, which opens Pre’s Linux to remote login. Once in the Pre’s command shell, you discover how robust and open the Linux OS at WebOS’ base really is. I think that once Pre developers get into the SDK, they will fall prey to the allure of the command line, shell script, and C. There isn’t another mainstream mobile phone that is as effectively rooted at the factory.

On the Desktop side, GWT is capable of producing portable apps (via upcoming HTML 5 standard) to leverage browser based applications to run on native desktops. In a normal GWT project you write all the UI and logic in pure POJO Java, without worrying about the compatibility of browsers that you are often concerned about when writing with other frameworks.

But why Am I talking about GWT alone? why not other Toolkits? DOJO isn’t bad either

I never said other toolkits are bad. Others that exist today are fairly immature as compared to where GWT stands today. The SECRET is: GWT would be the base for applications developed for Chrome OS. Today Google just wants to experiment and commercial application (Google wave) and tomorrow there will be more.

Talkin about Pre – Competitors will probably be all over Palm’s (current) policy to permit Pre users relatively easy privileged access to the phone’s Linux. I think Palm handled it well; the Pre is invulnerable to remote access unless its owner follows a somewhat tedious process to activate Developer Mode, and Palm made locking the phone back down a one-touch operation.

The Future

Pre as a smartphone,  is the right price for an open mobile platform. I understand now why Palm was reluctant to let the SDK go public, but Palm’s little secret turned out to define Pre’s niche in the market. similarly google’s GWT was once looked with suspicion of being a java based UI development. And today, Wave’s demos has made it go beyond a normal user’s expectations.

I look forward to a more Open World where MOST of the basic applications we see Today would run Openly, proudly on the Web. The Future, is Open, portable and more Green-Tech. ]]> http://geeknizer.com/palm-pre-chrome-os-the-most-open-platforms-using-web-applications/feed/ 5 http://geeknizer.com/palm-pre-mojo-sdk-is-here-start-downloading/ http://geeknizer.com/palm-pre-mojo-sdk-is-here-start-downloading/#comments Thu, 16 Jul 2009 17:34:14 +0000 Tarandeep Singh http://geeknizer.com/blog/?p=1405 Read more »]]> After the long leaked Mojo SDK, the official mature SDK is out. The SDK, unlike iPhone SDK, is open to anyone who wish to write for Pre platform. Even in its initial beta stage, over 1.8 million+ apps have been downloaded from the beta App Catalog since Palm Pre was released less than six weeks ago.

Palm quotes at it’s official release blog:

Thousands of developers have participated in the Mojo SDK early access program since it began in early April. New applications are in the pipeline for the Palm App Catalog, and the App Catalog submission process will be opened to all developers beginning this fall.

The SDK is available for DOWNLOAD at the Palm developers site starting today. Also of interest are the user interface guidelines for the webOS, which detail how to design the UI (and its behaviour) of your application. Let’s hope Palm’s submission process isn’t a total unpredictable arbitrary mess like Apple’s.

So is Palm Pre going to get more popularity considering the fact that Palm’s policies are more Open than Apple?