Jon Zilber of Palm today announced in their blog that besides Electronic Arts also Epic Games support the webOS platform. Epic Games is in the middle of porting their Unreal Engine 3 onto Palm’s webOS. Epic’s Unreal Engine is well known from games like Unreal Tournament.
Epic is going to offer licenses for developers to create new and astonishing games for the Palm webOS platform.
Together with Palm’s Plug-in Development Kit (PDK) it will soon become very easy for developers to port visually appealing games to the webOS platform.
John Paczkowski of AllThingsDigital mentioned that sources close to Palm told him, Palm’s Plugin-Development Kit will allow easy porting of Apple iPhone games to WebOS. That could also explain how fast Electronic Arts ported “Need for Speed” to WebOS.
It seems Palm has eventually understood that Germany might be an important market for their Pre. The Pre is the most sold smartphone on the carrier O2 Germany. O2 Germany yesterday started to distribute webOS 1.4. The update we’ve all been waiting for desperately.
Free commercial Games for german customers
Sadly Electronic Arts’ free download offer for:
Need for Speed
The Sims
Monopoly
is for german customers only. Sorry guys from whereever you are.
New features
WebOS comes with some minor ;-) feature additions:
Many of us know the phenomenon. The longer we use the iPhone or the Palm Pre the slower it goes. Rebooting the system always helped on either device.
For the Palm Pre there is now a solution that is called Reboot Scheduler by Zinge, which allows to automize the reboot process and to schedule it to a certain time.
We feel this is a nice tool for people running homebrew apps on their Pre anyway. You find it via the PreCentral repository.
That’s what we really like about the Palm Pre WebOS platform: it embraces the homebrew developers. No jailbreaking, no hassle.
Telefonica (O2/MoviStar) has approved Palm’s latest update. We expect they found some bugs that are on the american 1.3.5.1. The update will be installed automatically over the air. The 15 MB update brings Tethering via Bluetooth and 3D graphics acceleration to European Palm Pre’s, thus allowing us eventually to play Doom, Quake and Need For Speed.
The update features:
installation of apps to the media partition, thus allowing to use up to 7GB for applications
simultaneous installation of apps from the AppCatalog
Downloads can be paused and resumed
speed improvements
improved support for prepaid SIMs
improved battery runtime
support for animated GIFs
We are still waiting for a full changelog from Palm for this update.
Warning
Before updating: don’t forget to use the “Emergency Patch Recovery” (EPR) tool, if you installed patches via PreWare. The EPR tool can be found in PreWare under Available Packages -> Linux Applications -> All -> Emergency Patch Recovery
Tablet PCs seem to be the next big thing. After Apple’s smartphone revolution with their iPhone, it seems the next big market revolution might be the Tablet PCs.
Steve Ballmer of Microsoft introduced one of the Tablet PCs – a prototype of the HP Slate – last week on the CES 2010. In his presentation the HP Slate is of course running Windows 7, what else, but there are rumors it might also be shipped with Google’s Android. We suppose Amazon’s Steve Bezos will not really like it, because Steve Ballmer showed the HP Slate running the PC Kindle application.
Dell seems also be ready to enter the Touch PCs’ market with the Dell Slate. Gizmodo.de got photos of a prototype of Dell’s Slate. Dell’s Slate has a 5-inch screen, most likely an OLED, a SIM slot and a 5 megapixel camera.
If Apple was a typical tech company they would also have showed something to the public on the CES, but Apple isn’t. Anyway there are enuff rumors floating around about Apple’s Touch-Mac – rumored to be named Apple iSlate. According to Reuters Apple might be launching the iSlate in Q2/2010. It is expected to have a 10 or 11-inch display and a aluminium case. TheStreet.com reports that Apple’s Slate will be shipped with a P A Semi CPU, instead of Intel based Atom CPUs. This could be also the reason, why Atom CPU has been removed from Mac OS X Snow Leopard’s latest update 10.6.2. It is widely expected that Apple will announce the iSlate on Januar 27th, 2010.
Kara Swisher of AllThingsD interviewed Mr. Podfather Prefather Jon Rubinstein of Palm at the CES. Although he seems to have been highly involved in the development of Apple’s iPhone back in the days when he was Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, he said he never used an iPhone. Well… All in all he wasn’t telling too much, but when Kara asked him, if Palm will do a Tablet aswell, Rubinstein answered: “(..) we designed webOS to scale and it could be used in different form factors.”
Quite a bunch of news for the Palm community has been presented by Palm’s CEO John Podfather Prefather Rubinstein. Find the whole video presentation at the end of the summary.
II. WebOS Update 1.4
WebOS 1.4 will be released in February, 2010 (in the US at least, we Europeans are still waiting for 1.3.5). WebOS 1.4 will feature:
Video Recording
Adobe Flash 10.1
better Battery Life and
improved performance
III. WebOS Plug In Development Kit
For developing native 3D games Palm secretely extended their development tools with a plug in kit, that allows to write code in C or C++.
IV. Native 3D Games
Moreover Palm showed they are in the know what their customers will like and how to explore more markets besides the Linux community. As of today some 3D games have been released to the U.S. American AppCatalog:
Need for Speed Undercover
The Sims 3
Monopoly
Asphalt 5: Elite Racing
Let’s Golf!
Glyder 2, and
X-Plane
IV. Palm Pre Plus coming to Verizon
A special version of the Palm Pre is coming to Verizon Wireless, only 7 months after the initial release of the Palm Pre to the Spring network. Verizon’s Palm Pre Plus is coming with 16GB Ram, a reworked slider mechanics and a tethering plan. Verizon is said to have one of the best 3G coverage in North America. We suspect the Palm Pre Plus to be SIM locked.
