One of the most anticipated smartphones for this summer is the Pre from Palm. Palm Pre runs on a brand new operating system, webOS. On April Fool’s Day, Palm announced an expanded early access to its Mojo SDK (Software Development Kit).

With Mojo, developers will have the ability to integrate their applications into core webOS functionality, such as linked contacts, layered calendars, multitasking, notifications and GPS capabilities. Palm is showcasing new apps from Pandora and Fandango on their website.

Palm also announced that it would deploy its first Palm branded cloud service, which includes the Mojo Messaging Service. This is an XMPP publish/subscribe service that allows developers to push live content to their applications or services.

If you’re a developer, Palm’s CTO Mitch Allen and the WebOS development team have written a new book : Palm webOS : Developing Applications in JavaScript Using the Mojo Framework. This book is currently available on pre-order from Amazon for US$24.

If you’re a veteran Palm user who has invested in many Palm OS applications in the past, you can still use them in webOS. MotionApps will be offering Classic, a Palm OS emulator for webOS. Classic should run Palm OS apps on the Pre about twice as fast as the Treo 700p — that’s really fast.

So overall, good news for users and developers. Many developers jumped to the iPhone platform over the past year, while Palm OS suffered a slow death. Maybe we’ll see more Palm developers like MotionApps return to the Palm fold — if Palm can bring them enough exposure (and revenue potential) like Apple has done through the App Store.

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Filed under: Palm OS

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