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Category: smartphone

  • WiMAX MENA: Roll-Out Strategy Key To WiMAX v LTE Debate


    Arguing that WiMAX is a better wireless 4G system than Long Term Evolution (LTE) – or vice versa – is a waste of time.

    That’s the view of Dr Hans-Peter Petry, head of radio access and transport at Detecon International, who is adamant that it’s pointless claiming either side in the 4G debate is superior to the other.

    "I would violently fight against those that say LTE is better than WiMAX," he said. "This is absolutely wrong.

    Even so, Petry, who is a speaker at this week’s WiMAX Forum Mena in Dubai, said that a key question in the WiMAX community is how it compares to other wireless technologies.

    He is addressing this in his presentation to the conference, which is entitled: Exploring The Capabilities Of Potential 4G Candidates And Understanding The Best Parameters For Benchmarking And A Successful Rollout.

    As part of this, Petry will "clarify the landscape" – essentially spelling out what makes a technology 2G, 3G or 4G.

    He told smartphone.biz-news this is necessary because many people are confused by what a technology has to offer before it can be classed as 4G.

    "There is a lot of confusion in the market," he said. "A lot of protagonists are confusing people with conflicting messages."

    "For 4G there are very clear pre-requisites and without them being implemented in the technology, you can not claim it is 4G."

    Dr Hans-Peter Petry, head of radio access and transport at Detecon International

    So WiMAX partly belongs to 3G – along with LTE and Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) – and only in certain circumstances can they claim to be 4G, according to Petry.

    He said Detecon had defined a metric that enabled each of the technologies to be evaluated in a fair way.

    This included: marketing, geography, services, tariffs, and technology inputs.

    "All these parameters are important for an evaluation," he said. "We have mapped these into a single Service Production Cost (SPC)."

    So it is possible to show the SPC for individual technologies under similar conditions.

    Petry said this has produced some "astonishing results", the outcome of which shows that the decision on which 4G technology to implement is not a question of the technology.

    "Under the same boundary conditions, the difference in the technology is minor."

    Where there are differences, according to Petry, they lie in the roll-out strategies.

    He said this came down to whether an operator is looking for coverage first, then capacity or vice versa.

    "The recommendation is that before you talk about the technology, talk about other things such as roll-out strategy," he said.

    So factors such as the kind of customer, whether the area is green field, brown field, rural or densely populated, all have to be considered.

    Petry said boundary questions then had to be dealt with before, finally, talking about the appropriate technology.

    "Then you can choose the right technology," he said. "Do not choose WiMAX because you think it is better than LTE."

    As a footnote, Petry said he believed LTE would ultimately capture a larger market share than WiMAX.

    That may prove correct, but as the performance and capabilities of WiMAX and LTE get better over time, the competition between them will become less important than that between wireless and wired broadband.

  • iPhone 3GS Enters Smartphone Wars


    Apple launched has its new iPhone 3GS with demand expected to be strong for the handset in the US and seven other initial launch countries.

    However, with a smartphone market also offering new handsets from Palm, RIM and Nokia, to name but a few, the landscape has changed considerably since the original iPhone hit the market two years ago.

    For the third consecutive year, lines formed outside stores as people waited for the chance to buy the newest iPhone.

    Unveiled earlier this month at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), the iPhone 3GS is described by Apple as "faster and more responsive" than the original iPhone, with more battery life and close to double the storage.

    If the length of the lines was less than previous iPhone launches then Apple’s decision to allow for advanced iPhone 3G S orders with home delivery could have played a part in that.

    So too could the current economic climate – or maybe it’s just that people are spoilt for choice when it comes to buying a new smartphone?

    Among the iPhone 3GS’ rivals are Palm’s Pre, RIM’s BlackBerry Storm, Nokia’s N97 and upcoming phones powered by Google’s Android or Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating systems.

    But with the US smartphone market growing 68 per cent last year – and growth of 20 per cent projected for 2009 – consumer appetite for these high-end devices is still strong.

    A key differentiator is likely to be apps – and Apple already leads the field in that respect by a considerable distance.

    RIM captured a 55 per cent slice of the US smartphone market in the first quarter of this year, while Apple had around 20 per cent.

    However, Apple’s App Store has 50,000 applications available – far ahead of what’s on offer at BlackBerry’s App World, Palm’s App Catalog, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile Catalog and Google’s Android Market.

  • HiT Barcelona: Telecoms Industry Has To "Reinvent Itself"


    Telefónica’s Carlos Domingo provided an interesting glimpse of the corporate navel-gazing underway at one of the largest fixed-line and mobile telecommunications companies in the world.

    The giant Spanish giant isn’t renowned – amongst its customers, anyway – for being at the cutting edge of innovation.

    But Domingo, Telefónica’s director of internet & multimedia and director of its R&D center, showed that it is grasping the nettle of change required if the challenges facing itself and the industry generally are to be met.

    Speaking at the HiT World Innovation Summit in Barcelona, he pointed to declining revenue growth in traditional broadband and mobile markets and the strong competition for the new revenue sources that are emerging.

    Innovation is the key to meeting this challenge, he said, but it means that companies like Telefónica have to change their mindset and innovate differently.

    Carlos Domingo, Telefónica’s director of internet & multimedia

    "The telecoms industry will have to reinvent itself in the face of the challenges ahead," he said.

    Until the liberalisation of the telecoms market in 1997, Telefónica was the only telephone operator in Spain and still holds a dominant position.

    But the incumbent has faced increasing competition in its domestic market – both in fixed and wireless.

    Aside from market changes, Domingo said the evolving telecom ecosystem had created the need for a different approach to innovation.

    He highlighted shorter time-to-market and development cycles, the need for permanent betas and the emergence of global markets, but with finer segmentation.

    The end result is that companies have to be able to anticipate the moves of competitors while coming up with their own innovative strategies.

    "We have to think more as a poker player than a chess player," he said.

    Transparency is a big part of this, according to Domingo, who outlined what he described as five "paths to openness".

    These cover the consumer, employees, the network, devices and innovation.

    The advent of social networking, where people reveal the minutiae of their lives on the likes of Tweeter and Facebook, is one such example.

    "The closed way of communicating to customers is something that they do not want because they expect to be treated the same way as they are in other parts of their lives," he said.

    "If you’re no longer speaking your customers’ language, if you no longer live in their world, the disconnect will be costly."

    As well as the need for transparency over tariffs, Domingo also spoke about how critical it is to have open tools like APIs and SDKs for developers.

    He said that telcos have "unique and valuable" assets that could potentially be mashed up with others.

    Domingo acknowledged it wasn’t always easy for developers to approach Telefónica with ideas, but he added that they can always email him directly.

    A refreshing approach and timely presentation – how that translates through a giant organisation like Telefónica will be interesting to see.

  • HiT Barcelona: Android Marketplace To Overtake Apple's App Store?

    INTERVIEW: Florian Seiche, vice president of HTC Europe, spoke to smartphone.biz-news ahead of his keynote address at the HiT Barcelona World Innovation Summit.

    He talks about the potential for Android’s Market app store and the opportunities that open source platforms offer as the mobile internet "explodes".

    Android’s Market will be at least as successful as Apple’s hugely popular App Store – and could prove even more of a hit.

    That’s the view of Florian Seiche, vice president of HTC Europe, who believes app downloads for the open-source software platform developed by Google could well emulate Apple’s success.

    Off the back of the iPhone, that success has been phenomenal – in April the App Store clocked up one billion software downloads in the nine months since it opened.

    However, Strategy Analytics recently predicted global shipments of Android-based smartphones will grow 900 per cent this year and it expects it to become a top-tier player in smartphones over the next two to three years.

    If that happens – with a range of Android-supporting handsets on the market – then Seiche’s forecast for Android apps will undoubtedly become a reality.

    He spoke to smartphone.biz-news before travelling to Spain for the HiT Barcelona World Innovation Summit,where he is making a keynote speech titled "The Application Explosion".

    He said the key to the whole mobile application ecosystem is to make it a really viable business for software developers.

    App Stores Vital

    One factor in this is for each open platform to have a central app store where consumers can discover what applications are available.

    "The iPhone has been extremely strong because it was the first to go out with a centralised market place," he said.

    "The Android Market will have at least the same impact, if not more. It combines a central marketplace but there is a much wider choice of devices being offered."

    Florian Seiche, vice president HTC Europe

    While the recent proliferation of app stores – LG is the latest to announce it will be launching one shortly – may cause consumers some confusion, Seiche said software had to reach consumers.

    "For the immediate future, the most important thing is to make applications as available as possible for the consumer," he said.

    "It’s a good thing for each open platform to have a central place where applications can be accessed."

    There’s no doubt HTC would benefit from Android becoming a global success story.

    Ties to Android

    The Taiwanese company was one of the founding members of the Open Handset Alliance, the first product of which was the Android mobile device platform.

    And the HTC Dream – also marketed as T-Mobile G1, Era G1 in Poland, Rogers Dream in Canada – was the first phone to the market using the Android platform.

    So HTC has been closely involved with Android from the beginning.

    However, Seiche said HTC’s role goes back further, to the late 1990s when it was founded.

    "We focused our entire vision and strategy on smartphone devices," he said.

    "We did this at a time when the mobile phone market was growing very strong across the world but it was still very much a voice-centric market with just the basic parts of the data world emerging in the form of text."

    Even then, Seiche said HTC had set its vision on a completely different kind of device – one that brought together what people were doing on PCs with mobile devices.

    He said being in at the infancy of smartphone development has helped HTC over the years to pioneer technology such as touchscreens.

    Evolve and Change

    His address on Friday at HiT Barcelona will look at HTC’s role in the smartphone evolution but also look at how the market will continue to evolve and change.

    The first of two big themes that Seiche will cover is how mobile devices will drive and revolutionise what’s happening on the Internet.

    The second is the open platform revolution, which is resulting in the proportion of handsets with open operating systems rising exponentially.

    Seiche said that with the help of industry collaboration, third party developers now had access to some very credible and powerful ways to distribute their applications.

    He said that was opening up a whole new market, as consumers saw how apps tailor-made for a mobile environment were improving the mobile experience.

    "That will continue to grow even stronger," he said. "At the end of the day, all of this should benefit the end user."

    However, Seiche said empowering the end user by enabling them to personalise smartphones was only possible in a world with open platforms – where users decide what apps are relevant and important.

    He said HTC’s role in this is to ensure it designed user interfaces that allowed users to quickly and intuitively access the mobile Internet, including connecting with services such as social networking.

    However, HTC has no plans to enter the app store arena, according to Seiche. Instead, he said the company sees its role as providing the "best possible framework" for the end user.

    "Then it is to arrange the world they create in an easy and compelling way," he said.

    HTC has also developed dedicated apps and widgets on its phones to allow users to access information ranging from stock movements to weather forecasts.

    Mobile Internet Boom

    If HTC is enthusiastic about Android, it is equally positive about Windows Mobile – the OS used in the majority of its smartphones.

    With Microsoft due to launch its own mobile software store shortly, the growing choice for consumers can only be good news for HTC.

    Seiche said the mobile Internet is about to "explode" with third party developers innovating strongly.

    "It’s a great opportunity for us," he said. "We see the main shift in the market towards open platforms.

    "We see opportunity in offering choice with different platforms, but always with great user experience at the top level no matter what the operating system."

    Smartphone.biz-news will be covering HiT Barcelona – please check our site for the latest news and interviews.

    HiT Barcelona: World Innovation Summit: June 17-19 FIRA Barcelona

  • West&Central AfricaCOM'09: African Mobile Growth Opportunities Attract Record Numbers


    While the African teleco market may not capture the headlines as much as other parts of the world, that’s not to say it’s being overlooked by the industry.

    So it’s good to see the organisers of West & Central Africa’s largest telco event announcing record pre-registered attendance for the AfricaCOM event in Abuja, Nigeria.

    Ian Hemming, CEO of event organisers Informa Telecoms & Media, said the 554 companies from 53 countries that are attending represent a 44 per cent uplift from last year.

    Getting underway today, the two-day event caters for the region’s whole telecom ecosystem – fixed, mobile, wireless, satellite and integrated operators and service providers, investors, regulators, vendors and analysts.

    Among the companies attending for the first time is Movius, the Atlanta, Georgia-headquartered messaging, collaboration and mobile media solutions specialist.

    Michael Edgett, director of product marketing at Movius, said the company – formed in 2006 with the merger of IP Unity and the Messaging Division of Glenayre – has had a presence in Africa for a long time.

    Its most recent dealings have largely been through channel partners, such as Nortel and Nokia Siemens, and South Africa-based operator MTN, which works throughout the region.

    However, he told smartphone.biz-news they also did some direct sales and, as part of the drive to build on these, Movius representatives are attending the AfricaCOM event for the first time this year.

    "Most of what we have been doing in Africa has been very simple voicemail and a few off-shoots," he said. "But we are seeing more growth opportunities and doing more ourselves."

    Edgett said this meant the company has been able to extend its presence in the area and show off some of its other products.

    For instance, Movius’ Voice SMS enables a user to send and receive an audio message, with a text message alert – allowing longer messages to be left.

    "We are starting to see a lot of interest in Voice SMS in parts of the world where literacy is low or there are multiple languages," said Edgett.

    The Voice SMS suite consists of both clientless solutions as well as Fun Talk SMS, a client solution that includes avatars, ringtones and background music.

    Movius’ Visual Mail Suite includes MessageMe Plus, a clientless visual mail service that functions on any phone using SMS or MMS.

    "There has been a lot of interest in Visual Voice Mail as a clientless solution and Voice SMS in general," said Edgett.

    Another area receiving attention is Community Messaging – which provides a service to people without phones by giving them a personal phone number that can be checked from a public phone.

    Edgett said this was attracting a lot of interest, particularly in rural areas or where people had moved to cities but wanted to contact friends and family in rural areas.

    Edgett said focused shows such as West & Central AfricaCOM have proved to be of real value in developing new markets.

    "We have continued to see a lot of growth in Africa and do not expect that to change," he said.

  • RIM Crossing Categories and Borders With Blackberry Tour


    RIM is boosting its Blackberry range with a new 3G dual-mode handset aimed at both its core executive users and the wider consumer market.

    Candy-bar shaped and with a full keyboard, the Blackberry Tour will launch with Verizon and Sprint in the US and Telus and BCE’s Bell unit in Canada.

    Ever-mindful of the fact the line between corporate and pleasure smartphone use is blurring, RIM has pitched the Tour between the consumer-oriented BlackBerry Curve and the corporate-focused BlackBerry Bold.

    The smartphone is intended as a "world phone" – providing voice and data services on networks outside a user’s home operator network – which has great appeal to business travellers.

    For this reason it supports 3G EV-DO Rev. A networks in North America, as well as 3G UMTS/HSPA (2100Mhz) and quad-band EDGE/GPRS/GSM networks abroad.

    For the consumer market, the Tour has all the multimedia features of the Curve, including a 3.2 megapixel photo and video camera with flash and media player.

    The phone is also preloaded with DataViz Documents to Go, allowing users to edit Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files directly on the handset.

    RIM has been left in the shadows recently – as Palm and Apple grab the spotlight with the launch of the Pre and the iPhone 3Gs.

    It will be interesting to see how its latest Blackberry offering fares as its rivals continue to encroach on RIM’s traditional enterprise stronghold.

    The BlackBerry Tour is expected to be available this summer. Pricing still to be announced.

  • Palm Entrusts Pre Success to New CEO Rubinstein


    Palm has appointed Jon Rubinstein, the man credited with delivering Apple’s iPod and iMac. as its new CEO amd chairman.

    He replaces Ed Colligan, who is stepping down after sixteen years leading the company.

    The executive changes come just a few days after Palm launched its Pre smartphone.

    Rubinstein, who joined Palm as Executive Chairman in October 2007 to help bring innovation back to the company, assumes his role as CEO on June 12.

    In his time with Palm he has been instrumental in the development and launch of the Pre and webOS.

    Palm said Colligan plans to take some time off, then join Elevation Partners, a major financial backer of Palm.

    Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal is claiming that Verizon will end Sprint’s exclusive deal with the Palm Pre in January 2010.

  • Smartphone Ownership Now "Mandatory", Not Techie Toy


    Not owning a smartphone today is the social equivalent to not having email a few years ago – at least in the US.

    That’s the conclusion of a report in the New York Times, which says that having an iPhone, Pre or BlackBerry is pretty much mandatory these days unless you want to ostracise yourself from "society".

    It says the devices are no longer a status symbol or techie toy but have become mandatory equipment for belonging to society.

    David E. Meyer, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, told the paper: "The social norm is that you should respond (to an email) within a couple of hours, if not immediately.

    "If you don’t, it is assumed you are out to lunch mentally, out of it socially, or don’t like the person who sent the e-mail."

    The report comes, conveniently, as research shows that 41 per cent of consumers will make a smartphones their next mobile device.

    As a result, smartphone volumes will grow to 38 per cent of all handsets by 2013, representing the largest growth opportunity within mobile devices.

    This makes the smartphone category the most important competitive battleground in wireless today, according to the Yankee Group study.

    It also shows that trends within the smartphone ecosystem are profoundly impacting the power dynamics between original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and operators.

    Traditionally, operators have had the upper hand when working with device manufacturers to bring a new device to market, but the power dynamics are shifting.

    With more competitive entrants, tighter budgets and increased consumer expectations, OEMs and operators need to work together, on equal ground, to thrive.

    Chris Collins, Yankee Group senior analyst, said the release of the Palm Pre spotlights the changes in the OEM-operator dynamic.

    "Sprint and Palm are two companies desperate for a blockbuster hit," he said. "And as such, they are either the perfect – or worst possible – partners for one another.

    "The fate of both companies relies on the success of their alliance around the Pre."

  • HiT Barcelona: Can Mobile Operators' New Openness Change Lose-Lose to Win-Win?

    Mobile operators are finally ditching proprietary operator APIs – so-called "Walled Gardens" – and moving towards exposing network intelligence to third parties.

    Next week’s HiT Barcelona: World Innovation Summit in Barcelona will be discussing the need for open networks in order to engage with the growing community of application developers.

    Representatives from the developer, operator and Internet communities are taking part in a panel discussion to develop the most effective approach for the GSMA’s One API initiative.

    Among them is Michael Crossey, chief marketing officer at Aepona, who spoke to smartphone.biz-news about some of the issues that will be coming under the spotlight.

    Mobile network operators seem to have done their utmost to prevent developers from innovating on the mobile Web.

    They have created barriers by using proprietary APIs – and contractual differences have limited the creation of cross-operator web applications.

    Equally, developers have been barred from accessing rich network capabilities such as authentication, seamless charging, location assistance, push messaging and connection awareness.

    This has undoubtedly been a lose-lose situation for both operators and developers.

    That is changing and according to Michael Crossey, chief marketing officer at Aepona, the whole mobile industry theme has moved towards one of openness in the past year.

    He told smartphone.biz-news that the main catalyst for this has been Apple’s desire to make it easy for developers to create applications for the iPhone by providing them with tools and a route to market for their apps.

    Michael Crossey, CMO at Aepona

    "This has sparked off a flurry of activity in the industry, with a lot of operators and other handset manufacturers announcing open strategies to help them tap into the activity of the developer community worldwide," he said.

    This is a marked change in tactic for carriers, whose expressions of interest in working with developers in the past have been superficial at best.

    "The reality has been that, while they welcomed creative thinking, they wanted to cherry-pick the best apps for themselves and bring them into their own networks to sell," said Crossey.

    This, obviously, hasn’t been in the best interests of developers and everyone from Google to the "two men in a garage" set-ups have found ways of getting around the networks.

    That realisation has finally hit operators, forcing them to "evolve their thinking", according to Crossey.

    Last Bastion Crumbling

    He said this has meant that the mobile operators "last bastion" – opening core network capabilities to developers – is crumbling.

    "Historically there has been a lot of resistance to that," he said. "But they are realising that unless they collaborate, they will get by-passed.

    "They look at the fixed-line world, where operators have lost the battle against over the top providers, and they are determined not to let that happen to them.

    "They realise that if they collaborate rather than close the networks, they can contribute to the process."

    It is widely accepted that one way to do this is to standardise API’s and interfaces within and across operator networks.

    The GSMA is leading the charge to adopt this approach – principally through its One API initiative, phase 2 of which has just been launched.

    Crossey said this strategy is seen as necessary because even if every operator opens its network, developers will still have problems because of the different approaches each carrier adopts.

    This would be both on the technical side and on the commercial one, because every operator’s interface is different – be that with regard to terms and conditions, payment methods, business models etc.

    Huge Breakthrough

    By creating a cross-operator API, Crossey said it is hoped the fragmentation that would otherwise exist between operators will be reduced.

    The GSMA is also proposing a common commercial framework to give developers a market for their apps.

    "The operator can be assured that if it complies with One API, this will be portable between operators – this is a huge breakthrough for operators and developers," he said.

    "If there is fragmentation, the whole ecosystem does not reach critical mass and the addressable market is not big enough.

    "If there is a single set of APIs, the internet model has shown that the developer community is huge."

    Operators may, understandably, be reluctant to embrace One API because of concerns that it would restrict them from differentiating their services from a competitor’s.

    However, Crossey said the technology means that it is possible to do both – have an API model for "commonplace" services such as messaging while still being able to differentiate on, say, video and multi-media capabilities because a particular operator has invested heavily in IMS technology.

    Crossey said that Aepona, as a specialist SDP (service delivery platform) provider, enables the operators make their network capabilities – communications, information and intelligence – available to developers.

    The Web Services-based APIs can then be used to telecom-enable both enterprise business processes and web-based consumer services.

    "We provide a technical platform that allows these capabilities to be exposed to developers in a way that they are familiar with on the internet," he said.

    On the web, developers use APIs to create apps that, for example, use Google maps and mash-up with PayPal or Amazon storage services.

    Crossey said that after preaching the message of openness to operators for a number of years, there has undoubtedly been a definite shift in operators’ willingness to embrace the concept.

    The Belfast, Northern Ireland headquatered company’s products have already been deployed by Tier 1 operators such as France Telecom/Orange, Sprint, Vimpelcom, Bharti Airtel, TELUS, TDC, BT and KPN.

    "We are having many other conversations now about operators using our technology," he said.

    Opening Up Potential

    Aepona is also working with developers to help them bring apps they have created to its operator clients.

    This involves showing developers how they can use network capabilities to greatly enhance their apps for use on the platforms Aepona has installed with operators.

    Crossey said a simple example is explaining that, rather than just relying on GPS data from high-end handsets for an app, developers can be shown that operator networks can provide location data for every handset.

    "So we can increase the addressable market to a huge degree," he said. "But very often the developer is not aware of what can be done."

    A shift towards openness has also to include ensuring developers feel they are sufficiently rewarded for their applications.

    If revenue-share models fail to do this developers will keep finding workarounds and alternatives to leveraging network capabilities.

    For more information on the HiT Barcelona: World Innovation Summit: June 17-19 FIRA Barcelona, click HERE

  • Palm Pre App Count Builds – Now More Handsets?


    Palm must be hoping it can quickly build on estimated opening weekend sales of 60,000 Pre smartphones – not least because Apple has cranked up the pressure with the launch of a new iPhone.

    While Palm’s Saturday launch has largely been judged a success, it was hampered by supply constraints which saw most Sprint Nextel stores get less than 50 phones to sell.

    The limited supply of handsets meant that the Pre sold out in hours at most locations.

    Sprint’s flagship Manhattan store had 200 units at launch. Its store in Boston’s Back Bay area had only 55, while one in San Francisco’s Mission district had 60.

    Palm and Sprint strenuosly denied they were limiting supplies deliberately, instead the restrictions were put down to manufacturing constraints.

    As expected, between 80-90 per cent of the first buyers were already Sprint customers – while about 60 per cent were prior Palm owners.

    Meanwhile, while one of the major concerns for the Pre has been the lack of apps for the phone there has been a flow of new software being announced by developers since Saturday’s launch.

    Among them are the WHERE and Photobucket apps.

    WHERE is a location based application that allows users to find different content based on their geographic position.

    It also highlights local content including weather, news, movie times, restaurant recommendations. You can also perform selective searches through WHERE and find out things like where to find the cheapest gas. WHERE will also have the ability to integrate with the Pre contact and calendar data.

    Photobucket allows users to send and upload photos directly from the phone. You can send any photo taken on the phone to a Photobucket album and shared through the website. You can also open a new Photobucket account directly through your Pre.

    Other applications include Zumobi’s Today Show and Sporting News Baseball apps for on-the-go news and sports updates, and LikeMe, which offers personal recommendations for restaurants, attractions, etc, based on your location.

    Beeweeb and Agile Commerce have also announced their plans to offer services to help developers create apps for the Pre and Palm WebOS.

    These new apps join the dozen or so programs that were available in the Pre App Catalog at launch, including Pandora and Fandango.

    According to Palm, more than 150,000 apps were downloaded on the first day the smartphone was available.

    Currently, the Palm App Catalog is in beta and the Mojo SDK is only available to a limited number of developers.