What with all the “battery optimization” excitement, we nearly forgot that Sprint’s new webOS 1.4.5 update doesn’t just empower the Pre; it also finally brings PDK’d OpenGL and SDL support to the Palm Pixi. On the off chance you don’t speak developer lingo, that’s short for 3D apps and games, and as it turns out the pint-sized Pixi doesn’t play the latter half-badly. PreCentral fired up a copy of Need For Speed: Undercover on the freshly-upgraded handset immediately above, and found the game perfectly playable with “decent” framerates and only slightly sub-par load times. Watch their spiffy Nissan turn tricks right after the break, and pray companies get cracking on some Unreal Engine 3 apps soon.
Still feeling abandoned, webOS users? Take heart, as the good folks over at THQ Wireless are working hard with that recently released PDK in order to port a number of its titles over to Pre and Pixi users. We aren’t being clued in just yet as to what games are undergoing the all important conversion process, but a tweet from the company’s official account has made it abundantly clear that it has “a number of [its] games in development for webOS.” We’d caution you against hoping for Star Wars: Trench Run and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, but we’re fully aware that it’s too late for that.
Well, what have we here? A friendly tipster, who just so happens to be a registered Palm developer, has sent us the latest informational email from the recently-swallowed outfit, and while the tone here may be gentle, the implications are certainly serious. According to the memo, a new webOS update is “coming soon,” and developers are being alerted that they’ll need to be prepared to test their apps when it hits. Sometime early this month, devs will receive a specific launch date for the SDK release candidate, and while we’re told that the “scope of the changes in this [forthcoming] update is limited,” it’ll be particularly important for coders to “test PDK apps against this release candidate.” Seems like that promise of seeing PDK apps hitting the Catalog by mid-year is on track, acquisition be darned.
WebKit’s all well and good, but every once in a while there’s a reason why you’ve got to pull out the Old Standby, right? Once reserved for the Maemo Elite, Firefox is slowly spreading from pocket to pocket, and webOS is mercifully the latest to get hooked up. We don’t know the full backstory here yet — it looks like you can’t download a user-friendly package right now — but this’ll undoubtedly be a good option when the Pre’s in-built browser simply won’t do. It’s not an official port we’re looking at, but let’s be honest: the community does a better job half the time, right?
Palm just showed us the Unreal Engine 3 running on webOS, which apparently took a couple weeks to port over to the platform using that fancy new PDK. It runs at a pretty smooth clip, with just a tiny bit of artifacting in our enemy’s death animation. As an added bit of wow factor, Palm has it currently setup to demonstrate the game at 1 fps when in card view. Like most touchscreen shooters, this doesn’t really solve the problem of simulating dual analog sticks, but it’s still a fun and good looking engine for a mobile device. We’re still unaware of any games that have been built for the mobile engine, which has now been shown for iPhone, Tegra 2, and will be headed to the iPad as well, but we have to assume we’ll be seeing some before too long. Check out the webOS video after the break.
We just sat down with Palm here at GDC and fished out a few more details on the PDK beta front. Firstly, and most interestingly, Palm has confirmed that the PDK now works on all of its handsets (instead of just the Pre and Pre Plus), which means Pixi buyers can stop hating themselves pretty soon. Apparently the level of performance degradation should be comparable iPhone 3G vs. 3GS, which doesn’t sound too horrible. This is functionality that wasn’t available even to Palm’s early PDK partners like EA and Gameloft, so we should be seeing versions of existing games make the jump to the Pixi when the time for PDK beta-developed apps to hit the Palm App Catalog. When will that time come, you ask? The “middle of the year,” or “a few months,” whichever sounds more promising to you. Palm’s not saying whether this new era for the App Catalog (anyone being able to release PDK apps, and those apps working on the Pre and the Pixi) will accompany a full-on webOS update, but it seems logical to us.
On a more technical front, we’re told the PDK supports the Linux standard SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) to ease in porting and development (Unreal for Linux runs using SDL, for instance), and that developers could even build apps like an audio processor that rely on PDK components but don’t show up in the UI at all, or OpenGL-empowered things that aren’t necessarily games or in 3D. Also, existing developers have only been able to do “full screen” games that rely on PDK components alone, but the PDK beta lets you mix and match webOS UI with PDK elements. Currently there aren’t many PDK games that use the extra Palm hardware like the QWERTY keyboard and the gesture area, but we’re told that’s all exposed to the developer, along with any other element of webOS that Mojo SDK users have access to. One notable plugin hangup is the fact that Flash only works in the browser, and can’t be embedded into a regular webOS app, PDK or no — though we have to assume this is something that’s in the works.
If you’ve been looking to get in on some of that red hot game development action that Palm’s been all about lately, check it out: among the announcements at this year’s GDC, Palm has announced the release of its public beta PDK for webOS. This bad boy promises to let devs “use C and C++ alongside the web technologies that power the SDK and mix them seamlessly within a single app,” just the thing for porting game titles to the webOS platform. And it’s available now! Hit the source link to get started — and maybe someday we’ll finally get to play Mr. Jelly on our Pixi. We can dream, right?
EA has already said that it was able to get 3D games up and running on webOS in a “matter of weeks” using the OS’ PDK (or Plug-in Development Kit), but it looks like Palm might be ready to step things up even further at GDC next week. While any official word will have to wait until then, John Paczkowski of AllThingsD says that he’s heard from sources close to the company that Palm will be now demonstrating how iPhone apps can be ported to webOS “in a matter of days,” and with virtually no degradation in performance. Not much more to go on that at the moment, unfortunately, but you can be sure we’ll be there at GDC to how this and anything else Palm might have in store pans out.
It’s been about a year since Palm pulled itself back from the brink of imminent destruction with the announcement of webOS and the Palm Pre, and even less time since the products announced actually hit the market. In that time span, the company has issued another handset (the small, less powerful Pixi), released a number of over-the-air updates to its OS (nine in all), and created and disseminated a slew of developer tools, including iterative releases of its SDK and a new web-based development environment called Ares. Throughout the ups and downs of the past 12-or-so months Palm has been “back,” the company has stuck with Sprint as its lone carrier partner in the US — so while it’s been innovating and tweaking on its platform and devices, the third-place partner has kept it from the larger audiences AT&T or Verizon might offer. Now — almost a year to the day — Palm has turned around and opened its devices up to the country’s largest carrier, in addition to bumping the specs and features of both phones it offers (the Pre getting an additional 8GB of storage and double the RAM, the Pixi is now equipped with WiFi). All the while significantly improving its SDK (with the new native Plug-in Development Kit) and app distribution model. So can Palm finally really get this ship sailing, court the developers it badly needs, and deliver on the promises of webOS, or is it too little, too late? Read on to find out!
That was a quick turnaround, wasn’t it? Palm wasted no time in retailing 3D games that are as visually engaging as the best the iPhone has to offer just as soon as it made the big announcement back at CES, and now it’s taking things to the next level by heading out to GDC in San Francisco this March. The Game Developers Conference is — as gaming goes, anyway — what you’d call a Big Deal, so the fact that Palm is leading a session there to educate interested parties in its Plug-in Development Kit is a promising sign that these guys are taking the concept of webOS as an entertainment platform very, very seriously. Of course, it would’ve been nice to see this kind of drive about a year ago — but better late than never.
We just sat down with Palm here at GDC and fished out a few more details on the 
