Palm’s PDK Hot Apps competition came to a close a few weeks ago, but it took Palm a little while to get through all the tallying and stuff to get a final list of winners. Unsurprisingly, Rovio’s ridiculously addictive Angry Birds came out on the top of the paid apps category, while Glow Hockey Free nabbed the top spot in Free Apps. That first place standing isn’t good for just bragging rights – the developers of each app will be getting $100,000 in prize money. Congratulations to Rovio and Natenai Ariyatrakool are due, so congrats, and enjoy the cash!

Palm tweaked things a bit from the Mojo version of the Hot Apps competition, so there were eight winners in the $50,000 prize block, four paid apps (Need for Speed Undercover by Electronic Arts, VisualBoyAdvance by dtzTech (with part of the winnings benefitting the open source warriors at WebOS Internals), Crusade Of Destiny by DVide Arts, and UNO by Gameloft) and four free apps (Raging Thunder by Polarbit, Pixi Dust Particle Simulator Game by WizardApps, Saber Ultimate by Draeger IT, and Natural + Electronic Drums for Pixi by EvilAnanas).

Another thirty apps (fifteen paid and fifteen free) netted their developers a $10,000 prize, while one hundred more (again, split between paid and free) gave the winners the option of $1,000 cash, or a brand new HP Envy 17 laptop computer.

Unsurprisingly, professional mobile game developer were scattered the PDK Hot Apps list just with their sheer numbers. Both Electronic Arts and Hexage had eight apps apiece make the list, while Glu Mobile had ten. But it was Gameloft that really dominated, securing twenty-five spots, all in the paid apps categories.

Again, congratulations to all of the developers that had winning apps. HP and Palm, more of this please. It’s fun, and this is the kind of stuff (along with pushing more units into hands) that’s going to help get developers onto the webOS platform.

Source: Palm Developer Center

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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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We’ve got to be honest, we’re really impressed by the clip at which Palm has been pushing updates and new release apps since the international App Catalog launch. Yesterday brought us nearly 20 new apps, and 158 updates (not a typo – one hundred fifty eight). Granted, many of those updates were to bring international meta-data to paid apps that were previously only available in the US of A, but that’s no excuse now. It’s a long list, so I’ll stop my typographical jabbering and just point you past the break.

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We’re still roaming the show floor, hunting down what webOS news we can find – meanwhile our forums are afire with talk of the new 3D apps. This app review is brought to you by forum member FiXXXerX.  

So here we are, hours after the CES Press conference with a series of new apps that have been released by some fairly high profile companies, a first for WebOS and a much needed boost to the App Catalog. Today I will be reviewing Need For Speed – Undercover. In case you’ve been living under a rock that has been hidden in a cave for the past decade you most likely know what Need For Speed is, however, for those of you that have only recently emerged I’ll give you an overview of what your looking at here. The Need For Speed (Or NFS for short) franchise from Electronic Arts is all about taking a stock production car and personalizing it per your taste and then driving it… fast. This personalization includes performance tweaks and visual modifications and then going out and establishing yourself as a dominant racer in a number of different scenarios. The game we’re looking at today has you going Undercover (As the title suggests) and racing against all sorts of nasty-for-no-reason thugs who apparently spend a majority of their time street racing… in fact, just imagine Fast and The Furious with less plot and your in the right zone, so lets get into it…

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So yesterday might have been a big day at CES 2010 for Palm. We got the Palm Pre Plus and the Pixi Plus, and they’re going to be exclusive to Verizon. We got the Pre headed to SFR in France. We got Flash, a webOS App Gallery on PreCentral, video recording, and webOS 1.4. But what’s exciting, and what we get right now, is new apps. And those new apps come with 3D gaming, ala the iPhone. In fact, Palm’s new Plug-in Development Kit allows developers to make C and C++ apps that will work beautifully on webOS. As such, developers like EA, Gameloft, and Glu are here and showing off what that delicious hardware is really capable of. Curious what games are available? Well, while you’re waiting for the App Catalog to load, we recommend you hope right past the break and catch a glimpse for yourself of our daily list.

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