Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the PreCentral.net Best of 2010 Awards. We received more than 27,000 votes for this year’s awards, and the wide array of winners reflects the variety and ingenuity of the webOS developer community, both official and homebrew. Dozens of apps to choose from, made by dozens of skilled developers, but in the end, there can be only one Best of 2010.
So, without further ado, the winners are… listed after the break. Yeah, such a tease.
After receiving more than 3,600 nominations, we’ve sorted through them all and picked the best to be put to the vote for the PreCentral.net Best of 2010 Awards. There are seventy-two separate apps up for the awards, along with a dozen developers, and some themes and patches for good measure. It’s a veritable smorgasbord of webOS goodness, and it’s now up to you to pick the best of the best. After the break you’ll find the polls to crown the Best App of 2010, Best Developer of 2010, and many others.
Oh, and did we mention the prize for the homebrew crowd? Thanks to the awesome folks at WebOS Internals we’ll have a developer Palm Pre 2 to give to the winner of the Best Homebrew Developer of 2010 award (assuming that he/she doesn’t already have one).
You’ve got until Midnight Eastern Time on December 17th to get in your vote.
Update: it’s the last day to vote – get it on after the break!
There’s lots of goodness going around in the Palm world, and we feel like making sure it all gets recognized. Thus, the PreCentral.net Best of 2010 Awards were born. Think of it as the Emmys, but for webOS apps. Unlike the award shows of Hollywood, we want your participation in the Best of 2010 Awards. So we’re opening the awards to nominations – your nominations.
After the break you’ll find a list of the categories in which we are seeking your input. We want to know what apps you think are worthy of consideration for a Best of 2010 award. To make it even better, once we’ve got all the nominations in, the balloting will again be done by you, the loyal webOS community. Nominations will be open until Friday, December 10th, midnight Eastern time. Voting will begin on Monday, December 13th and will run until midnight Eastern on December 17th.
A friendly reminder that we’re planning on giving away the next Palm device, whatever it happens to be, to the person who submits our favorite mockup. We have a ton of entries so far (here’s a preview), but the deadline for submission is midnight tonight, eastern time.
So go check out the rules here and get drawing/photoshoping/video rendering/sculpting/whittling!
We wanted to end today’s develop-o-rama on a high note – so here it is: next weekend we’re going to launch the PreCentral Featured Apps program! As a webOS user, it’s increasingly hard to find the good apps. As a developer, it’s increasingly hard to get your app noticed. We’re hoping we can help with both of those problems.
It’s simple, really: we’ll be spotlighting apps on the sidebar and in our main blog feed on a much more regular basis. You’ll see screenshots of our favorite apps and apps from developers who care about our readers in our webOS App Gallery.
If you’re a webOS user – stay tuned, we’re launching in a week or so. If you’re a webOS developer – read on to learn how to enroll in the PreCentral Featured Apps program. Oh, one other thing – we don’t want your money, we just want to help promote your apps. The program, it’s free.
Feeling like you’re spending too much time on PreCentral? We assure you that you’re not. But if you feel like you should be spending more time elsewhere on the internet, we thought you’d be glad to know that PreCentral is elsewhere on the internet as well. Be it on the old standby Twitter or our new Facebook fan page (or in the really old standby of RSS), PreCentral is everywhere that you want to be. Check it all out after the break…
One of the complaints we’ve heard often from Pre and Pixi owners is that the only way to browse the App Catalog is on their devices. Today we’re pleased to announce that those complaints can be set to the side, as we at PreCentral have partnered with the good folks at Palm to bring you the PreCentral webOS App Gallery.
Palm has been gracious enough to provide us with a free and open feed to the App Catalog, and that just makes them pretty much awesome. We’ve taken that feed and converted it into something that you can easily browse on your desktop machine, as well as in the webOS web browser. Right now you can check out the latest updates, search for apps, browse the various categories, and check out screenshots. This is in beta from both ourselves and Palm, so don’t be surprised to see more exciting additions in the days and weeks ahead (once we recover from the excitement that is CES). [Note from Dieter: Very beta, we're working on improvements, thanks to everybody who has sent in suggestions!]
Want to check it out? Of course you do. Just point your browser to http://www.precentral.net/app-gallery
The competition for “most open” software platform will always be a fierce one. It all depends on what your definition of “open” is. Do that mean open and easy development, like webOS, or do you mean completely open source, like Android? Our friend Casey Chan over at sister site Android Central last week got his robot paws on webOS in the form of the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi and was tasked with giving the world his impressions of the platform from the Android point of view.
Jumping headfirst into any platform is a new experience, so thankfully we’ve got the PreCentral forums to help out both novices and experts alike. You all in the community stepped up to the plate to give Casey a crash course in webOS 101.
So what did Casey think about webOS? In truth, there’s a lot on paper that seems very similar about the two operating systems. They both support full multitasking, they both have unobtrusive notifications, the both have application stores, and they both work on capacitive multitouch screens (well, Android is a sometimes in that category). But the similarities end there, and Android does have a year’s start on the relatively fresh webOS. We don’t want to give away all of Casey’s thoughts and observations about the first efforts of Palm’s rebirth, so we’ll just give you a link to Android Central where you can check them out for yourself.
Once you’re done with that, we’re sure you’ll be on a webOS high, so we want to keep it going by giving you a webOS phone. It’s a giveaway! All you have to do to enter the contest is leave a post in a Smartphone Round Robin thread on the PreCentral forums and once this all wraps up we’ll pick a winner. As always, the rules for these contests are suggested reading. Casey has already passed off the Pre and Pixi to Kevin Michaluk of CrackBerry.com – Kevin’s going to need the ease of webOS after a week with Windows Mobile, while our own Dieter Bohn is about to get some face time with BlackBerry.
Of all the smartphone platforms in play for this year’s Smartphone Round Robin, webOS is clearly the very newest. Outside of our own Dieter Bohn, none of the other Smartphone Experts network sites editors participating in the Round Robin had had significant face time with webOS, and that includes WMExperts editor Phil Nickinson. So when Phil got a Palm Pre and a Palm Pixi shoved into each hand, we left him on the side of the road asking, “Whaaaa?”
Thankfully, the trusty and knowledgeable members of the PreCentral community stepped up and gave Phil the help he needed so that he could knock out a comparative review of webOS in a week’s time. It helps that the webOS user interface is incredibly easy to learn and navigate.
Phil came away with plenty of observations about webOS, especially with how Palm’s rebirth comes as Windows Mobile seems to be losing its footing. What all did Phil think about webOS, the Pre, and the Pixi? Well, we don’t want to ruin the surprise for you, so you should head on over the WMExperts to see what he has to say about webOS cards, apps, and hardware.
Of course, if you want a Pre or Pixi for yourself (or a loved one), we’re here to help you out. All you have to do is leave a post in a Smartphone Round Robin thread in the PreCentral forums and you’ll be automatically entered to win a Pre or a Pixi. Cool, eh? Of course, there are some rules, so read up before posting down. And stay tuned in the next week as Casey Chan of Android Central takes on webOS (he just tackled Windows Mobile) and Dieter gets hands-on time with Nokia’s S60 and Maemo. Hopefully he can wash that iPhone smell off his hands first.
We know that there are some of you out there that have a Palm OS app that you can’t do without. The folks at Palm and MotionApps also knew that, so they created the Palm OS emulator Classic so that you could still run Agendus and Epocrates and other Palm OS apps on your webOS device. But where oh where to get the apps? How about PreCentral? Yep, that’ll do. We’re pleased to be able to announce that PreCentral has partnered with MobiHand to create the PreCentral Classic App Store where you can browse and buy your favorite Palm OS apps and download them straight into Classic.
More than 150 apps are available from the PreCentral Classic App Store, several of them free. There are apps for the business and finance crowds, dozens of games, reference apps, and even apps for personal healthcare. Check it out at http://software.precentral.net