So the Mojo SDK is out, meaning Palm should be ramping up to start some serious competition with the iPhone, right? Wrong. In fact, they’re just starting an ecommerce program that will allow developers to charge consumers for the applications they (the consumers) download. The program will launch in beta in mid-September.
I tried to be skeptical when I heard critics heralding the death of Palm. I knew things weren’t great for the company, and I’ve written a few posts expressing my general discontent with how they’ve handled the launch of what could be a really great phone. With every new decision/announcement I think, “now they’ll get it right,” or, “they must have learned by now,” but they clearly haven’t. I realize the infrastructure to support a phone on the scale of the Pre costs a lot of money and takes a lot of people. But Palm could have thrown a lot more effort into understanding the post-iPhone market and positioning their device accordingly. Hell, just getting people an early SDK would have been nice. Embracing the homebrew scene would have been nice. All of the things consumers did to try to make the phone a success would have been nice.
Instead, Palm remained tight-lipped on progress regarding the SDK release and slowly leaked out details and new features to try to excite developers. It was a promising phone at launch, but assuming developers would wait for months to get a chance to enter a fresh app ecosystem was just crazy. Now we’re 3 months past launch, the phone isn’t selling particularly well (not well enough to save the company for certain) and Palm is starting a beta ecommerce program.
The only good news in this little mess is that they’ve decided to get the program to the public while it’s still in beta instead of waiting until December or so for a full release. It’s still too little, way too late, but at least we can look at the glass 1/8 full instead of 7/8 empty.
