Homebrew Apps (part deux)
Some exciting developments in the Homebrewed Palm Pre Apps community this past week: at 31 apps, there are now more homebrew apps than official app catalog apps. As you must know by now, homebrew apps are applications that aren’t available through Palm’s official app catalog, but need to be installed (“sideloaded”) through other means. Some of the new ones are quite exciting, including an app to play good old Tetris and an “active screen” app that modifies your Palm Pre homescreen to show calendar events, latest news, the weather, and other widgets.
There is significant progress being made in making the installation process for these homebrew apps much easier and pain-free. There is now a working desktop installer for Windows (still needs a little polishing though) that does a lot of the work for you. All of this is still not really ready for the mainstream but serves as a strong indicator that there’s a healthy developer community working away on apps for the Palm Pre. Even better, once Palm decides to open up the developer program a little further, these apps will soon be available right from within the App Catalog. Excited? So are we!
Tags: homebrew, Mobile Phone, Palm Pre, Smartphone
This makes me really optimistic.
That homescreen is brilliant, clean, simple, uncluttered and hopefully customisable i.e. add stocks rss feeds etc
Palm really needs to get with the program and start go load these apps from the catalog it is taking way too long
This is what is going to make this phone so popular. Is a better design and more user open than the iphone or anything else.
Yeah, Palm & Sprint lets get some more apps A.S.A.P
Please Palm Pre… get your applications going as soon as possible… I feel sometimes like an idiot telling everyone how great my new phone is… (even better than iPhone) but I’m always confronted with the comments… “Oh! but does your phone also do this… or that?”… and I’m like “puff”… “Well… not yet… but they are working at it”… is what I say. I thought you guys had it all figured out when the phone was released…
When they say:
“…once Palm decides to open up the developer program a little further, these apps will soon be available right from within the App Catalog.”
I hope it happens soon… I think that one of the greatest success of iPhone is the continued development of phone applications that keeps the customers wanting for more.
Palm people: hurry… hurry!
I like my Palm Pre, so don’t take this the wrong way. iPhone is much more advanced and continues to gain ground. Sprint/Palm need to really press the issue of application availability. There is an app for everything and anything on iPhone and I would really like to see that happen for my Pre.
Zach’s right. Take it from someone who owns both a Palm Pre AND an iPhone. Why both? ‘Cause I work for Sprint, and I really want to see this thing succeed.
That said, I am very impressed so far with the Pre experience -I can’t agree 100% with the design remarks -personally, I wish the Pre were a little less plastic, but I expect that will improve in later generations.
Indeed, apps are the new differentiators when it comes to smartphones, and it remains to be seen if Palm will meet the challenge and inspire as large a developer market as Apple has, but I remain optimistic. I’ve always liked Palm.
how come a phone like ours can’t even forward a text. I feel like a dork around people when they ask me to forward something… I end up saying “sorry my new phone that should be beating the I-phone cant forward texts yet” Come on now my moms cell phone from 1999 can do that.
What everyone is forgetting is length of time here. Was it not the iPhone at the start with little or no apps at the start of it’s timeline? The Pre has just barley came out. Give it time and the process will improve.