Pre Might Actually Work. Good News for Developers?

Starting the middle of last year, I thought it would be great to have a competitor to the iphone that would make it easy to create web based applications that can fully exploit the capabilities of a smartphone.  I therefore started rooting for Palm as soon as they showed the Pre at CES at the beginning of this year.   Well, the Pre is arriving tomorrow and the reviews by Mossberg, Pogue, Engadget et al suggest that it could actually be a contender.  Of course there are some issues, such as the mechanics around sliding out the keyboard, but overall there seems to be way more good than bad.

This is great news for consumers of course as we have already seen how the competition between the iPhone and the Blackberry has driven innovation for endusers.  But the Pre has the potential to be more important for another group: developers.   Apple has created a beautiful device from an enduser perspective, but it is kind of a pain to develop on for several reasons.  First, there is Objective C, which I find odd at best.  Second, you have to learn a whole new and complex framework (Cocoa Touch).  Third, and most importantly, you have to deal with Apple’s approval process for apps which has been painful for many folks.

The PRE is offering a distinctive approach in the first two areas.  First, programming is done in Javascript.  Some might argue that’s not much of an improvement over Objective C, but I strongly disagree.  There has been a ton of work by third parties on Javascript and the only really bad part is the name.  Second, yes you do have to learn a new framework (Mojo), but much at least part of it are based on standards (HTML5) and the overview description here makes the rest sound more intuitive than Cocoa (disclaimer: I have not yet tried it out).  On the third point, it remains to be seen how Palm will handle it.  They have not done a lot prior to launch and have not given nearly enough people access.  This part feels rushed and off to a bad start, but given that Palm has managed to deliver the device itself I am willing to cut them some slack initially.

Now it might seem that having device fragmentation is a bad thing for developers.  To some degree it is because targeting multiple devices is always more work.  But it sure beats a situation without competition with too much control by a single vendor.  And there is always hope for cross-platform development frameworks, such as phonegap.