As Palm reports on their blog, Epic Games has demoed their Unreal Engine 3 on the Palm Pre. Unreal Engine 3 is the ‘gaming engine’ behind lots of your favorite console style games – from Gears of War to Batman: Arkham Asylum to BioShock to, well, a lot of games. We humbly assume it’s because we asked for this in December.

Naturally it would be a little overly optimistic to hope for console-level graphics and gamelength on a mobile phone, but if you were wondering if webOS had the potential to run with the big dogs when it comes to mobile gaming, the answer is yes. It’s all possible, of course, because of the PDK. If you missed it, we’ve got a video interview with Palm discussion the philosophy and possibilities of the PDK.

(p.s. Yes, that’s a photoshop above)

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Checking the data in our webOS App Gallery, we noticed today that Palm has topped over thirty million downloads from the App Catalog. Palm provides three ways to download apps directly now (and we have App Galleries for them all):

• Official webOS App Catalog Apps
• Web Distribution Apps for webOS
• Beta Apps for webOS

If you total up the downloads for all three app distribution models, Palm has served up a total of 33,749,305 downloads as of this writing. If you add in the 5.8 million downloads from PreCentral’s own Homebrew App Gallery and the many patches and other homebrew apps served up by WebOS Internals via Prewar, the total number of apps and patches downloaded by webOS users easily exceeds 40 million. Updates to apps likely count as another download, so that number isn’t necessarily a good indication of the number of webOS devices out there.

The most-downloaded app in the Official App catalog is Pandora, with 1.2 million downloads – see the full list of most-downloaded apps here. Unsurprisingly, the apps that make up the most popular webOS apps have all been around for a long time on webOS – which is to say that the new 3D games have yet to even crack the top 100 most-downloaded webOS apps (Asphalt 5 Free clocks in at 104).

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What defines a good day in the App Catalog? We’re still not entirely sure, but we think that yesterday’s app drop certainly should be in contention for the designation. What all happened? Fun and useful apps of both the PDK and Mojo varieties, plus the requisite slew of updates to boot. That’s right. Why do you doubt me? Head on past the break to see what I’m talking about. That’s where the list is, but you knew that already.

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You got most of the deets yesterday on the news on Palm’s Plug-in Development Kit: it’s coming to the Pixi, regular developers will have to wait for a couple of months before they’re able to distribute PDK apps, and you’ll be able to mix and match the PDK with the regular SDK.

Rene from TiPb spoke with Joe Hayashi from Palm yesterday, detailing the PDK in broad strokes in a way that the rest of us non-developers can make sense of. Palm’s main message is a subtle dig on Android and iPhone: if you’re on Sprint or Verizon and want cool 3D games right now, your best bet is the Palm Pre.

What interests us the most is how much thought Palm is putting into integrating ‘native’ PDK stuff with the standard webOS web-app architecture. It will be pretty cool to see apps that utilize a combination of quick-to-code standard elements with the fancier and shinier PDK elements. Right now PDK apps are just games – but we’re excited to see utility and productivity apps.

We’d say we’re pretty bummed that developers won’t be able to release their PDK apps right away, but from how we understand how the PDK works right now, basically it looks like PDK apps completely un-sandboxed and able to do whatever they’d like to webOS’ linux underpinnings – potentially very bad. So a future update to webOS will definitely be necessary (and welcome, as it always is) to get a wider distribution for PDK apps.

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Hey, look at that, new apps! Yeah, new apps make us smile. Especially when the list of new stuff includes stuff like the bible translated into Klingon or a fantastic homebrew graduate like podcatcher drPodder. It’s stuff like this that makes us laugh (because we’re giant geeks) or proves useful that makes up for things like the “quotes” apps that we see so much of. For what it’s worth, don’t worry too much about the App Catalog being overtaken by this stuff – we’re not alone. While you won’t find Apple and Android patting Palm on the back and saying “It’ll be okay, trust us,” they’ve lived through the proliferation of less-than-useful apps as well. How do you think Apple got to more than 140,000 apps? It wasn’t sheer willpower, we’ll say that much. Regardless, we’ve got new apps, and you’ve got a list after the break to check out. Do it.

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It’s here!  Gowalla, the hotly anticipated location-based social app, has finally hit the App Catalog, joining the likes of Foursquare and BrightKite (check out Parafoil on webOS for that).  Like Foursquare, Gowalla allows users can "check-in" to places and alert their friends via the app, Facebook and Twitter to where they are, and app logs all of your travels in a virtual passport.  Instead of  mayorships, badges and the somewhat competitive nature of Foursquare, Gowalla get virtual goods which can be dropped or picked up in various locations, stamps for places you’ve visited, pins, and a number of "trips" to complete.

The location space in mobile is rapidly heating up, with companies like Yelp, Facebook and Google getting into the game, and it’s great to see these kinds of apps coming to webOS in such short order.

So, Foursquare users: now that you’ve got another choice, how many of you are going to make the switch?

 Thanks to everyone that sent this in!

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A longtime favorite in the Homebrew space, the best podcast listening app on webOS is now officially available in the App Catalog for the low price of $.99! DrPodder will allow you to download podcasts on a schedule, listen to them at your leisure, or even stream them on the go. You can search for podcasts, add them manually, or even export all your podcasts from iTunes and import them into DrPodder (Click Podcasts, then go File -> Library -> Export Library. Be sure to name the file drpodder.xml, then put that file on your Pre’s USB root) 

Even if you’re already using the free, Homebrew edition, if you have $.99 to spare (and we know you do) it’s worth a download from the App Catalog. If you’re not a homebrewer but are addicted to podcasts, you owe it to yourself to give the app a whirl. Our favorite feature, naturally, is that our very own PalmCast is featured.

Go get it.

Thanks @Audemars02!

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Palm has released their Plug-in Development Kit Beta for developers to allow them to create rich, 3D games and other native linux apps for webOS. The PDK is available now at the Developer Center.

Palm looks to be making a pretty big push with this – they’ve released at the Game Developer’s Conference and are pushing that they are offering great gaming experiences on multiple carriers:

"Palm webOS is the go-to platform for great games on two of the three leading carrier networks," said Katie Mitic, senior vice president, Product Marketing, Palm, Inc. "We have both the developer tools and the hardware necessary for a world-class gaming experience, and an impressive portfolio of webOS game titles from top-notch developers to show for it."

Full press release after the break. So, developers: how’s it look? Legend79 emailed us to note that Palm has chosen to use Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) for hardware access – which to us looks like yet another way to enable easy porting.

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That’s more like it. While the app feeds may still be running behind, the App Catalog itself has shifted back into drive and is moving full steam ahead. There’s plenty of newness in there from the last app drop, including location-based social networking-like apps Streetbrew and Gowalla. Coolness, eh? And of course, there are plenty of other apps, including games, reference tools, and the obligatory public domain book or two. It’s all after the break, in the alphabetized lists you know and love.

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App availability on webOS outside the United States has been a long and arduous saga – one we’re hoping is coming to an end soon. Over at Palm’s developer forums, we have some clear evidence from psartini that Palm is well on their way to laying the groundwork for offering paid apps internationally – they’ve begun adding code to their developer backend to support VAT. ‘VAT’ as in ‘Value added tax,’ as in ‘necessary for processing payments internationally.

In addition to the above, an anonymous source expresses confidence that Palm is targeting March for offering paid apps to all countries. One more tidbit – right now Palm and EA have partnered to offer EA’s webOS offerings for free to webOS users outside the US – but the free program ends …March 31st.So for all you folks outside the US: Get your EA games for free while the getting’s good and take heart at this glimmer of hope that your long international nightmare of not having paid apps on webOS may soon be over.

Oh, one last hopeful note: Palm has also promised to bring the new and improved Facebook app to international users "soon."

Thanks, anonymous!

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