Palm has finally released their WebOS SDK, giving developers a chance to enter a totally virgin app market. You can bet there are droves of programmers hoping to port their popular iPhone or Blackberry apps to Palm’s web-based OS and maybe make a quick buck. A few of them are already expressing some distaste with the SDK. Some of those developers may even be abandoning the platform before it gets started.
Why you ask? There are two glaring problems. The first is no OpenGL support. Palm was clear that the Pre was not going to be a gaming device. They plainly stated gaming would not be a focus for the phone any time in the near future, in fact, so this isn’t a huge surprise. It still sucks though, in that it limits games to some seriously ugly graphics.
The bigger problem, at least in terms of the number of applications affected, has to do with the phone’s accelerometer. For now, the SDK only allows accelerometer polling at 4Hz. What that means to the layman is the phone only checks its orientation 4 times per second. For smooth graphical transitions you need something on the order of 20Hz, bare minimum. For more advanced applications, like the kind that can measure velocity, you need 50-100Hz. An iPhone application called gMeter currently provides this function, and its actually the gMeter developer, Craig Hunter, who’s pointing this stuff out.
Both of these issues could be updated at some point down the line, but the future may be too late. Limiting a developer’s options doesn’t mean they’re going to find creative workarounds. For a lot of programmers, it means they won’t bother. And that sucks, because Palm has the first truly fresh app store in a couple years, something they could easily use to woo hungry developers.
The silver lining here may be that the App Catalog won’t even release new material until fall at the earliest. Maybe by then Palm will be ready to make some changes. From what they’ve done so far, though, you won’t find me holding my breath.
