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Palm’s webOS PDK beta adds Pixi native development, PDK’d apps will hit the Catalog mid year

We just sat down with Palm here at GDC and fished out a few more details on the PDK beta front. Firstly, and most interestingly, Palm has confirmed that the PDK now works on all of its handsets (instead of just the Pre and Pre Plus), which means Pixi buyers can stop hating themselves pretty soon. Apparently the level of performance degradation should be comparable iPhone 3G vs. 3GS, which doesn’t sound too horrible. This is functionality that wasn’t available even to Palm’s early PDK partners like EA and Gameloft, so we should be seeing versions of existing games make the jump to the Pixi when the time for PDK beta-developed apps to hit the Palm App Catalog. When will that time come, you ask? The “middle of the year,” or “a few months,” whichever sounds more promising to you. Palm’s not saying whether this new era for the App Catalog (anyone being able to release PDK apps, and those apps working on the Pre and the Pixi) will accompany a full-on webOS update, but it seems logical to us.

On a more technical front, we’re told the PDK supports the Linux standard SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) to ease in porting and development (Unreal for Linux runs using SDL, for instance), and that developers could even build apps like an audio processor that rely on PDK components but don’t show up in the UI at all, or OpenGL-empowered things that aren’t necessarily games or in 3D. Also, existing developers have only been able to do “full screen” games that rely on PDK components alone, but the PDK beta lets you mix and match webOS UI with PDK elements. Currently there aren’t many PDK games that use the extra Palm hardware like the QWERTY keyboard and the gesture area, but we’re told that’s all exposed to the developer, along with any other element of webOS that Mojo SDK users have access to. One notable plugin hangup is the fact that Flash only works in the browser, and can’t be embedded into a regular webOS app, PDK or no — though we have to assume this is something that’s in the works.

Palm’s webOS PDK beta adds Pixi native development, PDK’d apps will hit the Catalog mid year originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A lava lamp and a Nexus One tested under 3 Gs of force (video)

Neil Fraser, a true pioneer of science, wasn’t satisfied with just wondering whether a lava lamp will work on Jupiter. He opted instead to build a freaking centrifuge in the middle of his living room, strap an innocent lava lamp and a Nexus One to one end with counterbalancing weights on the other, and spin that monster up to find out for himself. His instrument was able to generate 3 Gs of lateral force (despite the Nexus One’s G-Force reporting 2.0 Gs due to a bug, now reported to Google), which is comfortably above the 2.5 G gravitational pull that one might experience on the solar system’s biggest planet. So, did the goo keep its mojo under pressure? Did the Nexus One survive the ordeal intact? Click past the break to find out.

Continue reading A lava lamp and a Nexus One tested under 3 Gs of force (video)

A lava lamp and a Nexus One tested under 3 Gs of force (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 08 Mar 2010 09:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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HTC Desire: your Nexus One with Sense and Flash has arrived (video)

digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/tech_news/Google_Nexus_One_Sense_Flash_The_HTC_Desire’; The one thing you’ll never see on a stock Nexus One is a skinned interface like Sense or TouchWiz — they’re just not Google enough for a phone commissioned and sold directly by Mountain View. Thing is, Sense on Android has plenty of fans, and the mere thought of running it on something with as much oomph as a 1GHz Snapdragon brings tears to our eyes. The solution? The Desire, of course, featuring virtually all of the original Nexus One’s mojo with a little less direct Google support, a little more Sense, and a trackpad in place of the old trackball. The 3.7-inch AMOLED display carries over, but things get interesting on the software side: not only do you get HTC’s freshly-updated Sense with Friend Stream, you also get Flash 10.1 compatibility, which means you need every clock cycle of that 1GHz more than you ever thought you would. Unfortunately, North Americans, you’re getting screwed on this one for the time being — HTC is only announcing that it’ll be “broadly available” throughout Europe and Asia in the early part of the second quarter, while it’ll come to Australia via Telstra. Supersonic, care to save us?

Update: Promo video is now after the break (thanks, O’Neill!), and our hands-on with the device at MWC can be found here.

Continue reading HTC Desire: your Nexus One with Sense and Flash has arrived (video)

HTC Desire: your Nexus One with Sense and Flash has arrived (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Feb 2010 05:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Palm throws the doors open: review-free app distribution over the web, open source developers can hop in for free

Well, things just got interesting. The very evening of the App Catalog’s launch of paid apps, Palm has made a very different kind of announcement: it’s going to let developers skip out on the App Catalog if they so choose. Devs will be able to submit an app to Palm, who will turn around and give them a URL for open distribution of the app over the web — without a review process getting in the way! The App Catalog will still exist for those who want to use it of course, with a $50 entrance fee to get an app inside — and we’re guessing it’ll remain the only way to distribute paid apps — but the new URL distribution should decentralize things just a little bit. In other good news, Palm will be dropping the $99 annual developer fee for folks building open source apps, and hopefully that free ride applies to App Catalog entry as well, though now there’s web distribution to make it less of a sticking point. Palm’s also going to open up its analytic data to developers, and even is giving away Pres and Touchstones to the audience members of the little shindig privy to this announcement — clearly the company is making a strong play for developers, and who doesn’t like to be loved?

[Thanks, Lawrence]

Filed under: Cellphones

Palm throws the doors open: review-free app distribution over the web, open source developers can hop in for free originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 05 Oct 2009 23:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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