Last week, Palm Infocenter analyzed several of Palm's "partners in precrime" that were announced by CEO Ed Colligan at the CES 2009 presentation. This week, they discuss another five of the third-party team that Palm is assembling for the launch of their new device.
Part two focuses on Yahoo!, Amazon, MobiTV, Pivotal Labs, and Dataviz. Applications are built using familiar web technologies including HTML5, CSS and Javascript. Native C development will not be an option, at least at launch. There will be true multitasking, synergy with all PIM data, and applications will have access to the pop-up notification area for convenience. Below is a summary of the partners covered in this issue:
- Yahoo! is the most visited website worldwide, second only to Google in search. Their e-mail is top dog, and messenger, maps, flickr, music, and news portals are also among the most popular in the world. We haven't seen any demos for Yahoo on webOS thus far, but it would make sense to integrate their search engine, and possibly maps in some manner. For example, choosing which search engine or map engine to use could be an option. Mail integration is an obvious choice, with POP access, although whether you will have to pay for POP use is debatable (as all users except iPhone have to pay currently).
- Amazon is the world's online retail giant and is also big on eBooks and digital music downloads. webOS will feature a built-in client for the music store, allowing you to download directly to the device. The mass storage device feature should allow easy synchronization. With the release of the new Kindle 2, the ability to sync your Pre with the Kindle and other devices (so you don't lose your place) will be a sought-after feature. Finally, integrating upcoming releases into the calender via Synergy makes for some interesting possibilities.
- MobiTV includes live television, streaming video and digital music. Partners with Sprint, they will provide video services for a fee. Pop-up reminders via the notification area will be a possibility, when you're show's about to start.
- Pivotal Labs was already featured in a recent interview , and is a consultative firm that develops for other third parties and for themselves. Pivotal Tracker is likely to appear on webOS, a web application that allows development teams to collaborate on projects in real-time. That being said, they were likely coordinators for the webOS developer camp.
- DataViz is well known for their Documents to Go program, offering mobile compatibility with Microsoft Office documents. Every smartphone Palm has had this built-in. It's very likely they will bring the document program to webOS, possibly now integrated with an online document-sharing feature to compete with Google's services.
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