Palm execs hinted at some surprising trends in their
quarterly earnings call yesterday, including a community-driven approach to application discovery and the possibility of licensing the Palm OS to other manufacturers.
Although the Palm Pre has had a
million applications downloaded, so far there are still only a few dozen apps because the device's software development kit (SDK) hasn't been made fully public. The company is still "tweaking some things" in the SDK, Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein said, and will open up the SDK to "thousands" of developers within the next few weeks.
More intriguingly, though, Rubinstein hinted at some sort of community-driven element to Palm's app store which will set it apart in the future.
"As you get large numbers of applications, you know, discovery and finding applications that are interesting to you becomes more and more difficult, and so we hope to use much more of a community approach to solving that problem," Rubinstein said.
What could that be - some sort of wiki, maybe? Searching based on user recommendations? We'll have to find out in the future.
Execs also hinted at the possibility of licensing their WebOS to other manufacturers. While they haven't decided to do so, "it's not a religious issue for us," Palm CFO Douglas Jeffries said.
Palm long ago licensed their Palm OS to third-party manufacturers, most notably to Sony to create that company's
Clie line of PDAs.
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