Will Palm's webOS woo developers?

In hopes of reinvigorating its brand, fallen PDA leader Palm ditched its legacy operating system and introduced a completely new one at the Consumer Electronics Show. Palm is counting on its new webOS mobile platform and initial handset, the Pre, to entice both consumers and, equally as important, an influx of software developers, who will create programs and applications that will jumpstart Palm's recovery.

“It was the most robust [OS] if you go back five years,” said Avi Greengart, research director of mobile devices for Current Analysis. “If you go back two weeks, it was falling apart and almost nonexistent. They lost most developers to other platforms that looked like they had a future because the Palm OS 5 didn't have a future.”

Palm is hoping to win those developers over to webOS by drawing on its strengths in personal information management. The company has chosen to focus on the PC as the means for installing apps and synchronizing with online services to bring a user's information together, regardless of the origin. For example, webOS can aggregate calendar information from all of a user's calendars and color-code the entries by source, as well as run multiple apps simultaneously.

Palm's app framework, Mojo, relies on the familiar — including HTML 5, CSS and JavaScript — in the hope that ease of use will be enough to encourage developers. Palm also has already built some sophisticated, attractive apps and claims it will be ridiculously easy for other developers to do the same, Greengart said. Still, with the onslaught of app stores open to developers, the company is up against stiff competition. Palm is betting the business on its new handset and OS, he said. If it fails, so too will the company.

“They have a lot of challenges, but — given the challenges — they've done as good job as you can imagine,” Greengart said. “The hardware is great. The software is great, and it's differentiated in a way that works with their brand, which is tough to pull off.”