[echubb]

Interesting. How vibrant is the dev community for Palm phones?

OTA Updates are another story on Android. Different manufacturers price OS updates differently like Samsung, who price them as feature updates whereas some other Android phone manufacturers price them as cheaper maintenance upgrades. It can be a bit of a lottery as to whether your phone will ever receive an upgrade.

[yardie]

I'm part of the WebOS dev community and its small but growing. I've sat on the fence for a while because I wasn't sure where Palm would be a year ago. And while I found the interface to be the best in the smartphone space (sorry iOS) the hardware it was deployed on was deplorable.

They are moving from Mojo (javascript based) to Enyo (C++ based) platform so quite a few developers are also waiting for the new SDK. Most of the apps that are currently written in Mojo will continue to work but I sense that most developers are in the same boat I am. No point in learning a framework that has one foot in the grave when the next one is right around the corner.

[grayrest]

Enyo is NOT a C++ platform. There's a C++ "plugin development kit" that's been out for a couple months now and AFAIK that doesn't change when Enyo gets introduced. I didn't really look, not particularly interested in WebOS C++ development.

Enyo is a palm-developed js framework originally created by the Ares editor team that performs (reportedly) dramatically better on the same hardware than Mojo. I believe the difference is that Enyo uses a javascript layout system a la Sproutcore/Cappuccino instead of the html+css layout in Mojo so they're basically innerHTMLing everything instead of performing a bunch of DOM manipulations/reflows. I'd expect a number of other changes but aside from that and allowing multiple-layouts (i.e. for tablets) that's all I came away with from the developer day talk on it.

I started looking into WebOS when CES was going because I was wondering at Palm's absence. It turns out that the homebrew community is surprisingly vibrant and they have (basically) an independent market app (preware) for their apps and patches. I was most impressed by the patching. The entire interface is interpreted, so changing how things work is just a matter of modifying the appropriate javascript and rebooting the device.

All in all, I was impressed enough to get a developer account and start intermittently hacking apps. Enyo isn't out but it'll have to come out soon in order to handle tablet layouts so I'm heistant to commit to a Mojo app before the big Feb 9 event. I don't know about a webos phone (google apps+NewsRob+Kindle on android do basically everything I want to do with a phone) but I'll definitely be getting a WebOS tablet for reading/development.