Being that TomTom showed off their turn by turn navigation system at WWDC, and being that AT&T has hardly mentioned their Navigator app in recent memory, it seems odd that AT&T would be the first to release a turn by turn navigation app.

They were, though, in a free app download today. Don’t let free fool you. The app will add a $10 charge to your AT&T bill.

The application was developed specifically for the iPhone 3GS but it will work with OS 3.0 on other iPhones. The app gives you turn-by-turn navigation, updates traffic information and will let you search by your location for the cheapest gas.

AT&T may have made a smart play here, giving them the early adopters. I’ll be interested to see whether other turn-by-turns run for a similar monthly fee.

Palm continues to baffle me. I wrote a post the other day questioning the judgment behind withholding the WebOS SDK from the general public, and to day I find this article from Medialets. It’s an explanation of the Palm strategy to date concerning their App Catalog and includes one hugely disturbing fact.

Pre users have downloaded more than 600,000 apps.

When I read that my thoughts looked something like this: “..” “….” “……??!?!?!??!?!?!” Seriously, what the hell. The phone launch was a relative success, we know that. It wasn’t huge. It wasn’t earth-shattering, but for both Palm and Sprint it was a success.

People want apps, we know that. There have been more than a billion downloads on the iPhone, the Android market continues to grow, and now this. With just 30 apps in the Catalog, users are piling apps on to their phones. Why doesn’t the market at large have the SDK yet?

Medialets cites some interesting theories. First, most of the available apps are in beta. So what, the apps need more testing? Several of these apps are running version 0.9, as in, the last major revision before 1.0. Will they really be so different? Can developers even vouch for their app’s stability under hundreds of thousands of scrutinizing fingers? No, they can’t. Apps are nearly never bug-free at launch, and the growing pains of a new platform are part of the geeky fun of owning a brand new device.

Medialets also suggests the App Catalog isn’t ready for the deluge of submissions that would come with a public SDK. I can understand this. It’s a lot to sort through, and it’s no secret that Palm has been struggling. The number of people required to handle a hundred submissions a day, making sure they (the apps) won’t brick anyone’s Pre, is enormous. Paying those employees will be a serious expense, which leads us to the last problem: money.

It always comes down to money, and the App Catalog has no way to make any. As of today, there’s no payment system in place to reap the rewards of a well-developed app. Palm isn’t the only one hoping for a revenue stream from the store. Developers need to be paid for their time, and their best efforts should be justly rewarded, affording more time for people to put together more great apps.

The problem remains that this wasn’t planned well enough before the Pre’s launch. I can understand and even empathize with Palm for their troubles, but they botched this thing. You can’t expect to launch a phone like the Pre without planning for a payment system for apps you know people will want well in advance. I don’t want to hear “we’re working on it,” or “it’s not ready yet.” Those are crap excuses, and the only reason for them is a complete lack of foresight.

AT&T’s free myWireless Mobile app has been out for quite a while now so if you live in the US and don’t have it already, you should. This app is a simple way to view just about everything related your wireless account as well as add features to your plan and monitor your usage. It’s quite convenient and in my opinion, should have been available since the iPhone was first released.

So, from the home page, you can click Bill & Pay, Usage, or Features. Under Bill & Pay, you can view your last payment, payment date, current balance and due date, as well as bring up PDF copy of your current bill. Pretty handy to have that all in one place. AT&T also gives you the option to make a payment from this screen as well. It was nice of AT&T to give us the ability to pay the bill from this app because we all want to make sure AT&T gets their money on time.

The Usage section is just what you’d expect. You are able to view Anytime, Night/Weekend, Mobile to Mobile, and Rollover Minutes used from the main screen. A nice addition for those of us on family plans is that you can also see all this information per individual. This would be convenient for parents as well as nosey husbands or wives. Also available in Usage is your data used which includes messaging as well as internet.

Finally, the Features section is a way to upgrade your plan. AT&T wanted to make sure anyone, anywhere with and iPhone and this app can always add more features to their plan. Not paying enough for your iPhone plan yet? Well go ahead and add Roadside Assistance or maybe VoiceDial for Postpaid. In all seriousness though, if you are traveling abroad it is easy to use this app to add Expanded Internation Roaming or 20 MB Data Global Add-On without having to call customer service.

So there you have it, AT&T myWireless Mobile app for the iPhone. It’s free and convenient so I recommend downloading it.

I like the Palm Pre. I really do. I’m starting to wonder, though, if Palm does.

For all the excitement surrounding their best phone release in years, Palm seems to be doing their damnedest to let the Pre slip into obscurity. Perhaps the best feature of the new Pre is its operating system, named webOS because it comes built on web technologies that supposedly make developing on the platform a breeze. The platform also supports multi-tasking, a feature missing from the Pre’s ‘roid-induced cousin, the iPhone Unfortunately, Palm has yet to release the webOS SDK, which would give developers a chance to put some great apps in the hands of Palm fans and iPhone malcontents. In fact, the SDK isn’t coming until the end of summer.

“We’ve been working very hard on the SDK and are eager to open access on a wider scale, but the software and the developer services to support it just aren’t ready yet,” says Palm. I have to ask, then, did they pick the right time to launch the phone? It’s all well and good to try to gain ground before the new iPhone drops, but why launch when a solid app development platform could greatly improve the phone’s appeal? There are plenty of unsatisfied Apple/AT&T customers. Why not pick them up in the wake of the 3GS?

As of today, the Pre’s App Catalog sits at just 30 apps. At that level, they have no chance. Even if there were a couple hundred the Pre might have just enough appeal to lure in some the folks who spurned Apple’s advances. Show them multi-tasking with apps they love and you could start to build a base of very satisfied customers, and that’s exactly the way to gain market share.

For now, a lot of Pre users are content to homebrew their apps, porting games like Doom and piecing together tethering on the fly. But that magic can only last so long before serious developers get bored, or get so entrenched in the iPhone or Blackberry development that they all but forget about the Pre. That’s something Palm can’t afford. We’ll see how hungry developers are by the end of summer, assuming they stick around.

With all the excitement surrounding the new iPhone release it’s difficult not to notice the absence of a certain, rumored to be healthy CEO. Apple restructured their laptop line, announced two OS updates, and announced the newest iPhone, all without their captain at the helm. Hopefully Jobs will soon be well enough to return to his handicapped parking space.

We’ve talked Macbooks, we’ve talked iPhone, but Apple spent most of the keynote on OS 3.0 and the new options it yields for developers. All of this stuff was really old hat – landscape keyboard, copy and paste, tethering, MMS. The big disappointment so far is that tethering and MMS are both unsupported by AT&T at this time, with support apparently coming at the end of the summer. Why AT&T can’t get it together when 20 other carriers can baffles me.

One cool feature coming to OS 3.0 on the 17th is “Find My iPhone.” The service, which is only available to MobileMe customers, allows you to locate your phone on a map using a web browser. Using the service you can also send alerts to the phone, including a message stating, “This phone is lost. If found, please call me at [number you specify].” (You can actually input any message, this is just the one Apple demoed.) You can do this from a distance, allowing you, hopefully, to get your phone back. Find My iPhone also includes a sort of kill pill, allowing you to remote wipe the phone. It would be really nice if it could disable the phone, rendering it useless to whomever snags it should they not acquiesce with your return requests. The remote wipe is really there to ensure your privacy, though, allowing you to restore the phone to factory settings from a distance. I smell some nasty pranks coming with this one. Don’t leave your MobileMe password where your friends can find it.

Apple relinquished the stage late in their 3.0 presentation, allowing developers to showcase new functions like GPS navigation and in-game purchases. The developer presentations dragged on, plagued twice by technical difficulties and eating up precious minutes. By the 100 minute mark I would bet few people were hoping for an iPhone update. It came, though, fitting the remaining time slot well as more of an evolution than a revolution.