Well, what an eventful keynote Palm delivered at this years CES 2010 event! I have to say I expected much less and was blown away at all the incredible unfoldings. Palm has been working hard and here are some of the exciting things covered:
3D Gaming - Palm has been working with select developers (EA Mobile, Gameloft, Glu Mobile and Laminar Research) on a new PDK plug-in which will give developers access to the GPU and programming in C, C++ languages. They released 7 new 3D games within an hour after the keynote and they are amazing! I myself have already fallen in love with Need For Speed Undercover and Monopoly 3D. This PDK plug-in will be released to the public at a gaming developers conference in March.- webOS 1.4 was previewed which brings us Video Recording with the ability to edit our videos as well and upload directly to YouTube, Facebook or send via MMS and email. This release will also include Adobe Flash 10.1 and a beta will be released "soon" to the App Catalog. (Pre Only) It was mentioned that battery performance will improve in this release as well. Hopefully the OS will be snappier if they make use of the GPU. This update is due in February!
- Verizon Wireless is getting both the Palm Pre Plus and the Pixi Plus available January 25. These "plus" models are exclusive to the Verizon Wireless network. The Pre Plus includes 16gigs of storage and a few minor adjustments such as the center button disappearing. The Pixi Plus will include wireless. The Pixi will also include 5 different available colors including some neon's. These devices will also include a new tethering app called Hot-spot which allows you to connect up to 5 devices wirelessly. (Will cost extra money and no prices were announced yet for either devices or plans)
- Palm announced a new partner SFR in France which will bring the Palm Pre and Pixi in 2nd quarter 2010
- Palm announced that the development is now open to the public and showed off some new tools that include thier new open-web distrubution which allows apps to be released with no approval process via a URL. They also made their app catalog feeds available so that websites can access and view all of their apps. PreCentral was included in this. There is an app called AppScoopavailable now which lets you browse all the current instant web releases not found in the App Catalog.
Great things from Palm! Checkout the 3D games available if you haven't yet. You'll be amazed that you are using the same device which runs games such as Air Hockey or Perfect Bounce choppy. These games run perfect and look incredible! Jon Rubinstein, CEO reiterated that in 2009, Palm announced they were back, and they meant it! For those that wish to watch the entire keynote video, visit www.youtube.com/palm
