Wednesday News Roundup – PDK, webOS 1.4 and Rumors
CC Photo by {eclaire}
This week finds Palm at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. We previously covered the beta release of the PDK, so check that out for some background. We’ll touch on that a bit this week as well as fill in some of the additional information coming out of Palm.
We’ll wrap up the release of webOS 1.4 from last week, drop into the rumor bin for a bit and then wrap up with some assorted news in the Roundup. Keep reading, please.
More PDK Details
One thing that we may not have fully explained was that the PDK supports not only the Palm Pre but also the Palm Pixi. Many had assumed that the lack of 3D games for the Pixi meant that they would not be available at all. As Palm notes on the PDK Web site, the drivers for the Pixi are still not optimized. What is less clear is how to reconcile Adobe’s claim that Flash won’t be available on ARMv6 processors, such as in the Pixi.
webOS 1.4 Available Everywhere
When we went to press (digitally speaking) last week webOS 1.4 had hit neither Bell in Canada nor Telcel in Mexico. As of last Friday, all the carriers were covered and all users can upgrade. A much better organized update than some previous ones, which left Europe stranded.
Rumor Bin: Palm Elan?
There was a bit of a stir this week when a PreCentral forum member posted information that AT&T was beginning testing on a Palm device code-named ELAN. There was much speculation, while some believe that the Elan is really the Pixi (or Pixi Plus). The post also indicated that AT&T has completed testing of the Pre and Pixi and that they will be available May 10th, after Verizon’s exclusivity on the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus expires. We’ll just have to wait to see how these rumors pan out.
Roundup
As we touched on in the PDK article, there is an alternative development kit available from WebOS Internals. In that article we mentioned that the WIDK will support Qt development. The impetus for that was the work of Darron Black, who first ported Qt to webOS. Read Darron’s blog for some information about the porting process. For those bargain hunters, a Verizon Pre Plus through WalMart is $30 while a Pixi Plus is free. For those into the whole social location sharing thing, check out Gowalla, which joined Foursquare in the app catalog this week.
Got something of note we overlooked? Share in the comments below!
