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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Again the awesome power of webOS is demonstrated by others’ desire to emulate it, this time by hacking a Nokia N900 running Maemo to play webOS PDK apps.       

 A video posted on YouTube shows The Sims 3 running silky smooth on an N900. Other users in a Maemo forum said Need for Speed Undercover and Let’s Golf with great success as well, and without much effort. Check out the video after the break.

It is not too surprising when you consider the specs of the Nokia N900 and the Pre are almost identical. Both have an OMAP3430 processor, both have a PowerVR SGX and OpenGL ES 2.0 libs, and both run a Linux based OS. Native apps for the Pre are written with SDL 1.2, which the N900 supports.

The only problem for an N900 user running one of these games is that the N900 does not support multi-touch, which would render some games unplayable unless a hardware work around could be devised, as one user suggested using the keyboard.

The Pre is one of the best gaming devices around. It is rivaled only by the iPhone and porting iPhone games to webOS can be done fairly quickly so there is not much of a disparage between the two devices. The games run just as smoothly on webOS as they do on the iPhone (with the exception of too many cards errors on a Pre minus). So after years of hearing about ‘iPhone envy’, it is nice to see some Pre envy out there.

Source: Maemo.org; Via WebOS Internals (Twitter), PreCentral forums

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webOS is moving up to version 2.0 and bringing along with it a whole host of new features sure to please even the most jaded of webOS users. There’s the stuff that we’ve already covered: card-grouping Stacks, enhanced and more capable Just Type with search and Quick Actions, Exhibition Touchstone dock modes, and expandable Synergy plug-ins.

That’s a lot, but if you ask us, not quite worthy of bringing the big 2.0. Here’s what else Palm didn’t let slip until today:

webOS finally supports Adobe Flash Player 10.1 (beta), and it comes baked right into webOS 2.0. Flash support is limited to the browser, but by and large it’s a rich and fluid experience, and one that we’re glad we can stop wondering if we’ll ever get.

You can now tag contacts as a “favorite.” Doing so has two consequences. One: the contact will show up under the new Favorites view in the Phone app. Two: contacts tagged as such will appear at the top of searches in Contacts, Email, Messaging, and Phone.

As glimpsed in earlier leaks, webOS 2.0 comes along with Text Assist. The new app and service build upon and greatly expand the auto-correction capabilities of webOS, including general spell checking, dictionary customization, and the ability to set your own macros (custom text strings with a short typed trigger).

Skype Mobile is coming to webOS, so long as you’re on Verizon. This leverages that exclusive Verizon deal, so don’t count on seeing Skype calling on any other webOS devices any time soon.

The new Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite is included from the start, displacing DataViz’s abandoned Documents to Go package. But the only thing you’ll get by default in webOS 2.0 is the Quickoffice viewer, which lets you read Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. There’s no editing just yet (we suspect Quickoffice wants to charge for that, which is reasonable, albeit disappointing), but the included app does sync with online services like Google Docs and Dropbox.

The Facebook app is also getting a bump to 2.0, which brings along support for Facebook Chat in Messaging, through the magic of Synergy. The new Facebook app also leverages the other new webOS tools, like Stacks, Quick Actions, and Exhibition.

And that’s just the beginning – explore the world of webOS 2.0 updated features after the break.

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With webOS 2.0 due out before the end of the year, we thought it’d be fun to take a look back at how far webOS has come since version 1.0. So we’re going to do that, and we’re going to go back to the beginning to start. Actually, we’re going to go back to the first update, webOS version 1.0.2, which landed on June 5, 2009, otherwise known as the day before the much-anticipated release of the Palm Pre.

It was a different time, both literally and figuratively – one only need look at the modern smartphone landscape to see how drastically things have changed since June 2009. For perspective, the top-tier phones of the day: the iPhone 3GS, the HTC Hero (only in Europe), the BlackBerry Bold/Tour, and the Palm Pre. My, how things have changed. After the break, we chronicle just how webOS has changed over the past 16 months.

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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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Palm’s PDK Hot Apps competition for one million smackaroos ends today, and the winners are starting to shape up. To remind you, there’s $1,000,000 to be split among the top free apps and the highest revenue paid apps, with the number one claiming $100,000, two through five getting $50,000, six to twenty netting $10,000, and the remaining twenty-first through seventieth apps getting their choice of $1,000 HP store credit or an HP Envy 17 laptop ($1300 value).

The top spots in both the free and paid app categories are pretty much locked down, and it’s no surprise to see Glow Hockey Free atop free apps and Angry Birds (shocker) reigning supreme over the paid apps. In fact, the top five free apps haven’t changed in at least a week, movement through the top five paid apps has been fairly static as well. That said, we’re happy to see the WebOS Internals-benefitting VisualBoyAdvance having moved all the way up to the #3 rank in paid apps, all but guaranteeing the developers a $50,000 check. Update: Rod Whitby of WebOS Internals has informed us that developer Will Dietz will be sharing 10% of his winnings with the open source group, retaining the rest to pay off student loans.

That said, there’s still some room for movers and shakers to jump up a prize level. Angry Birds Lite, the free version with nine extra levels not found in the paid version of the top-selling app, has rocketed up the charts to #8. Sitting at eighth place would net developer Rovio a $10,000 prize, but the game has a weekly jump rate of +21 (meaning this time last week it was 21 spots lower on the Hot Apps totem pole). With that kind of momentum, Angry Birds Lite could find itself up in the $50,000 app category by the time all is said and done.

The same can be said for NesEm on the paid side, sitting at #7 (two spots from $50,000) with a weekly rate of +4. Ground Effect, back on the free side, stands an outside chance at $50,000 as well, sitting at number ten with an impressive weekly rate of +18.

Rednecks Vs. Aliens looks to be threatened, with a weekly slide rate of -3 and sitting at the very bottom of the $10,000 bracket. The only saving grace there for developer Tower Defense Mashups could be that immediately trailing apps SongWave Drum Machine and Mech Invasion have worse weekly rates. TileStorm stands to take advantage of the apps’ waning fortunes, ready to jump out of the $1,000 bracket to ten times the prize.

Lastly, on the paid side of things, there’s one all but garaunteed app jump, and that’s Astraware Casino. Sitting at #22 in the paid line, just one app – NFL 2010 – stands between Astraware and a $10,000 prize. At their back is a very strong wind, to the tune of +3 daily movement and a very impressive weekly rate of +41. There also stands to be significant changes at the base of the brackets, with some of the fastest movers coming in from the bottom (like Whack-A-Mole, with its +131 weekly rate).

Have a favorite app not on the list – today’s the day to try to get that last minute push for more downloads. Check out the bottom of the leaderboard and the fast movers to see who’s on the bubble.

All said, it’s been fun to watch the Hot Apps competition and we’d like to think it did a lot of good for getting developers interested in Palm. It does sometimes feel like the app pace has picked up since the public release of the PDK, webOS 1.4.5, and the continuing Hot Apps competition.

Via: Palm Developer Center Blog; Source: Palm Hot Apps

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Palm’s PDK Hot Apps competition for one million smackaroos ends today, and the winners are starting to shape up. To remind you, there’s $1,000,000 to be split among the top free apps and the highest revenue paid apps, with the number one claiming $100,000, two through five getting $50,000, six to twenty netting $10,000, and the remaining twenty-first through seventieth apps getting their choice of $1,000 HP store credit or an HP Envy 17 laptop ($1300 value).

The top spots in both the free and paid app categories are pretty much locked down, and it’s no surprise to see Glow Hockey Free atop free apps and Angry Birds (shocker) reigning supreme over the paid apps. In fact, the top five free apps haven’t changed in at least a week, movement through the top five paid apps has been fairly static as well. That said, we’re happy to see the WebOS Internals-benefitting VisualBoyAdvance having moved all the way up to the #3 rank in paid apps, all but guaranteeing the developers a $50,000 check.

That said, there’s still some room for movers and shakers to jump up a prize level. Angry Birds Lite, the free version with nine extra levels not found in the paid version of the top-selling app, has rocketed up the charts to #8. Sitting at eighth place would net developer Rovio a $10,000 prize, but the game has a weekly jump rate of +21 (meaning this time last week it was 21 spots lower on the Hot Apps totem pole). With that kind of momentum, Angry Birds Lite could find itself up in the $50,000 app category by the time all is said and done.

The same can be said for NesEm on the paid side, sitting at #7 (two spots from $50,000) with a weekly rate of +4. Ground Effect, back on the free side, stands an outside chance at $50,000 as well, sitting at number ten with an impressive weekly rate of +18.

Rednecks Vs. Aliens looks to be threatened, with a weekly slide rate of -3 and sitting at the very bottom of the $10,000 bracket. The only saving grace there for developer Tower Defense Mashups could be that immediately trailing apps SongWave Drum Machine and Mech Invasion have worse weekly rates. TileStorm stands to take advantage of the apps’ waning fortunes, ready to jump out of the $1,000 bracket to ten times the prize.

Lastly, on the paid side of things, there’s one all but garaunteed app jump, and that’s Astraware Casino. Sitting at #22 in the paid line, just one app – NFL 2010 – stands between Astraware and a $10,000 prize. At their back is a very strong wind, to the tune of +3 daily movement and a very impressive weekly rate of +41. There also stands to be significant changes at the base of the brackets, with some of the fastest movers coming in from the bottom (like Whack-A-Mole, with its +131 weekly rate).

Have a favorite app not on the list – today’s the day to try to get that last minute push for more downloads. Check out the bottom of the leaderboard and the fast movers to see who’s on the bubble.

All said, it’s been fun to watch the Hot Apps competition and we’d like to think it did a lot of good for getting developers interested in Palm. It does sometimes feel like the app pace has picked up since the public release of the PDK, webOS 1.4.5, and the continuing Hot Apps competition.

Via: Palm Developer Center Blog; Source: Palm Hot Apps

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That screen you see above, that’s what shows up when you point a webOS phone to get.adobe.com/flashplayer. We’ve gone through many iterations of this screen, with the text prior to this one promising that Palm and Adobe were working to get Flash Player 10.1 onto webOS “as quickly as possible.” That came in July, and before that it was the second half of 2010, or the first half of 2010, or February, or by the end of 2009.

Obviously, not a single one of those has panned out (excepting the "second half of 2010"), despite the fact that we’ve been seeing Flash running on webOS devices since October of last year. And Adobe announced in June (of this year) that the finished version of Flash 10.1 had been released to their mobile platform partners, Palm included. It’s been three months since Palm supposedly received Flash, and in the meantime we’ve seen Adobe tinkering with download redirects. But now the message presented to webOS users is nearly as depressing as that given to iPhone users. It now reads:

Sorry Adobe® Flash® Player is not available from Adobe.com for your device’s operating system or browser.

Sad, eh? Having received this message ourselves and a number of tips from users like yourself, we decided to investigate, only to be met with nothingness. Our contacts at Palm had nothing to report, which is better than what we got from Adobe. Despite repeated requests for comment, we were met with stony silence from the folks at Adobe.

So the question remains, do we even care anymore? Sure, Android has Flash Player 10.1, so long as you’re running the right version of the OS on the right device. Even then, with the massively superior hardware that we’re seeing crammed into more and more Android devices, the Flash experience is still less than ideal. It’s slow, it’s cranky, it’s resource hogging. It’s, well, it’s Flash.

Android devices may be selling like gangbusters, but there’s still a large and influential player in the smartphone market that wants nothing to do with Flash: Apple. We’re not the biggest cheerleaders of the bitten fruit brand and their iOS operating system (though will continue to laud them for outstanding advertising), but at this point we’re understanding their position on Flash. In fact, we’re moving from understanding to agreeing.

Do we want a slow and painful experience on our mobile devices? No. Nobody wants that. It’s not like Flash is really a great experience on our desktop computers, and they’re several times more powerful than anything you can fit in your pocket. There are still some things that modern HTML5 browsers cannot do that Flash can, but here’s the question: between increasingly capable HTML5 websites and fully capable PDK apps, is there any need for Flash?

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Tanks! for webOS is a simple, vector graphics-based game where you …shoot at tanks. That’s pretty much it, but it’s addictive as all get out, has good sound (use headphones, as the sound is now directional), and a blast.

It’s a simple game – you simply launch, tap, and then get to driving and shooting. Controls are handled with two fingers – one on either side of the screen. These control the two treads of your tank, so steering take a bit to get used to. You tap the center of the screen to fire and keep an eye on the radar there to see the other tanks that are gunning for you. The result of all that is a game where you can actually see what’s going on (since your fingers are on the sides of the screen) as you play.

It’s a buck, it’s fun, it’s retro-cool, it’s a crime it’s not moving up on the PDK Hot Apps Leaderboard, and it should be on your device. Check out a quick video of the game after the break!

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Looking for a 3D zombie shooter for your Pre? Good news, there’s one coming. DVide Arts is bringing their popular Welcome to Hell zombie shoot-em-up from the iPhone to webOS using the magic of the PDK. DVide previously released the Crusade of Destiny RPG into the App Catalog, where it has proven to be a hit among users. Are you ready for blood and gore on a scale you haven’t seen on your phone before? Good, because we’ve got it in a video for you after the break.

Source: DVide Arts on Twitter; Via: Lisa Brewster on Twitter

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