Look out Taiwan, HP is coming in with the big bucks. According to Taipei Times, the world’s largest tech company is setting up a new research and development center in Taiwan, and at the cost of $112.5 million over the next three years. The center is estimated to need some $30 billion (with a b) in electronics components over that same three year span. The focus of this R&D center, dubbed the “Computing Hub”? Handsets, PCs, and servers. Handsets, as in devices like future Palm products alongside things like the HP Slate.

HP also plans to branch out a bit from their current product lines, with items like 3D active shutter glasses. Hopefully those won’t be finding their way to compatibility with any Palm products – don’t get us wrong, 3D is cool, but heavy battery-powered glasses are not. Said Kai Hsiao, HP Taiwan’s procurement head, “Innovation will be the key to the Computing Hub. It won’t carry out R&D for middle or low-end products. The center will also join hands with Taiwan’s academia.”

Source: Taipei Times; Thanks to David for the heads up!

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Finally, Palm and webOS gets a nice #2 ranking among smartphone platforms for anything. When you start talking about the likes of 3D mobile gaming, it’s obvious who number one is: Apple and iOS. What is unclear is who follows, and it depends on which group exactly we’re talking about.

If you’re talking all mobile devices, it’s murky whether Nintendo or Sony follow, or is there another smartphone contender they have to deal with. “Android?” you might postulate. HP senior exec and former PalmOne CEO Todd Bradley would disagree, he’ll tell you that webOS is the number two 3D gaming platform. In fact, he did just that during a TechCrunch Disrupt interview:

“We’re the second largest 3D gaming platform in the world today.”

Of course, the question then becomes, what metric is Bradley using? Is he talking about available titles, device unit sales, or some combination of the two? It’s hard to pin down exactly how many 3D apps are available for iOS, webOS, or Android (nobody’s got the patience to sort through thousands of apps like that), but we’ll side with Bradley and say it’s safe to declare webOS #2 in that race. Of course, there are still a dozen other ways that Palm and webOS fall behind (for instance, there are some 5,000 apps available for webOS, vs. the 80,000 in the Android Market and 250,000 in the iOS App Store), but it’s nice to be able to claim number two for something.

Source: TechCrunch

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I was able to spend some time with EA’s Need For Speed: Undercover on the Sprint Pixi after last night’s update to webOS 1.4.5, and I have to say that I’m pretty impressed by what what this little phone can do.  The frame rates aren’t as high as they are on the iPhone 4 or the Pre Plus to be sure, and Pixi’s the screen is tiny in comparison to both phones, but the overall experience was still surprisingly good.  Load times were longer but never unacceptable, cut scenes looked great, but installation took forever without the luxury of WiFi.  

Catch the video after the break!

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Palm loyalists out there will undoubtedly remember the name MetaView. Back in the days of PalmOS, he rose to fame with apps like PalmPDF (now named PDFmob), 2PlayMe, and notably Duke3D, a PalmOS Duke Nukem 3D port that won the Zodiac France Contest 2006.

MetaView has been developing for webOS for a while now, with releases like Match This!, MapTool, and ÜberRadio. Now, he’s returning to an old favourite and is bringing Duke3D to webOS.

Posted on his blog, Henk "MetaView" Jonas shares the above video of Duke3D working smoothly on his Pre. According to his post, the controls can be used all in the keyboard or alternatively use the screen as a virtual d-pad and have the rest of the controls in the keyboard (similar to Quake).

Interestingly, MetaView has told PreCentral that:

"The porting was really easy. Just some small source and makefile adjustments and both jfbuild and jfduke did compile and link. Not at all comparable with the old Palm OS where I needed several days just to get it compiled and another couple of days to have it running without crashes."

Seems the boasts of quick app porting to the webOS holds some weight. That certainly raises my spirits for the webOS platform as a whole.

Duke3D is now available for the Palm Pre and Pre Plus in the WebOS-Internals testing feed for those brave enough to try it while it’s still in-testing.

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Since Laminar Research’s launch of X-Plane 9 as one of the earliest official webOS 3D games during CES 2010, it has steadily pushed out versions of its other X-Plane games (already on iPhone) for the Palm Pre. As of February 15, the rest of the list includes X-Plane Glider; X-Plane Carrier; Apollo (lunar landing); Space Shuttle (a NASA space shuttle simulation); X-Plane Airliner; and the three latest: X-Plane Extreme, X-Plane Racing and X-Plane Helicopter (all listed here).

While I was able to review X-Plane 9 when it came out, it seems a bit much to review each of the X-Plane titles separately, since there is a fair amount of crossover. Instead, we’re going to take a look at one each of the three basic types of X-Plane apps: the pure simulator (X-Plane 9, Glider, Extreme, Airliner, and Helicopter), the competition (Carrier and Racing), and the spacecraft simulation (Apollo and Space Shuttle). While the specific experience (aircraft, controls, etc) may vary somewhat, the overall approach will be similar within each of these categories.

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Gaming has always been a sensitive topic with the WebOS.  HTML/CSS/Javascript leads to quick app development, but unfortunately limits game development.  Palm has attempted to help, giving a Mojo animator to help with 2D animation in javascript, and setting up a game development forum section. But let’s be honest, fast-paced 3D games with the current WebOS is likely to be a non-starter.

Previously we discussed Flash as possibly being solution.  However, to many, Flash just isn’t good enough and people kept crying out "We want OpenGL". Since Palm seems set on sticking it with html/css/js applications, that could be difficult.  Or maybe not.  Early last August, Khronos Group, the guys behind OpenGL, made the big announcement that they were now working on WebGL, which will bring OpenGL to the browser via javascript binds, with support from Google, Mozilla, and Opera:

First announced at the Game Developers Conference in March of 2009, the WebGL working group includes many industry leaders such as AMD, Ericsson, Google, Mozilla, NVIDIA and Opera.  The WebGL working group is defining a JavaScript binding to OpenGL® ES 2.0 to enable rich 3D graphics within a browser on any platform supporting the OpenGL or OpenGL ES graphics standards.

The working group is developing the specification to provide content portability across diverse browsers and platforms, including the capability of portable, secure shader programs.  WebGL will be a royalty-free standard developed under the proven Khronos development process, with the target of a first public release in first half of 2010.

Considering the WebOS is based off Linux, it certainly seems like OpenGL wouldn’t be especially difficult to port to it.  Then developers could use WebGL to integrate 3D graphics into their WebOS application. A surprisingly elegant solution, albeit something we’ll have to wait until 2010 for.

Not too long ago we saw a Palm job posting for a Game Frameworks Engineer. We can only hope the people who work on the Mojo gaming framework plan on implementing WebGL as it becomes available.  Not only would it save development time from making their own 3D graphics API, but it looks as though WebGL has the potential to be an industry standard. The WebOS has shown Palm is on the cutting edge of web-based technology, here’s hoping they continue that by adopting WebGL wholeheartedly.

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