The Pre's Got Mojo ☀
A developer speaks about Palm’s new SDK
Our developer also tells us that Palm is open to things Apple usually frowns upon, including running notification and periodic tasks in the background, providing direct access to the phone’s text messaging (SMS) system, and more.
Perhaps the part our anonymous contact was most excited about was Palm’s extensive use of open standards throughout the entire development stack. This is yet another point where Palm’s development model appears to be the antithesis of Apple’s iPhone model. Palm’s inclusion of the Mojo MVC framework is one of the developer’s favorite features—perhaps even better is that it’s optional and you can build your own from scratch if you prefer. According to our contact, the Mojo framework is extremely nice, well thought out, and significantly improves the speed and efficiency of developing mobile applications on the prė.
Palm’s embrace of “developer friendly” open platform philosophy for its new handset in development, in constrast to the decidedly unfriendly sandbox approach Apple has taken, certainly must be applauded. And a flock of delighted developers are cheering them on, as indicated by the cited article discussion, as well as tech sites across the net. However, I see no reference to a factor that looms larger than software platform — quality of the hardware.
Palm devices (PDA and their foray into mobile phone market space) are notorious for their unreliability and low quality. Historically, they are poorly made and break rather easily. Back when I toted a Palm PDA in my work travels, it frequently had to be replaced. And I remember giant pallets of refurbished PDAs in Fry’s Electronics, where devices would be recycled for second and subsequent deaths.
Experience with Blackberry devices, I do not have, but my iPhone performance and reliability (other than on OS upgrade days) has been stellar. In fact, the iPhone is more solid that it was nearly 15 months ago. I have not even witnessed battery degradation yet on my first generation model. Yes, I realize there are iPhone lemons, but I’d assess the iPhone defect rate at a fraction of all those Palm products.
