Bryan Nystrom from Natara Software has answered some questions for PDA-247 regarding webOS and Natara’s potential development for this platform.
1/ What was your initial impression of webOS and the Palm Pre hardware?
We were very impressed with what Palm had done. Unfortunately, they are about two years too late. They lost considerable market share and now must play catch-up. It’s also hard to judge “webOS” at this point since we really don’t have APIs or any other way of determining just how “open” and “flexible” Palm has made access to various hardware/software parts of the phone.
2/ Do you have plans to develop for this platform, and can we expect to see some of your existing titles ported over?
We definitely are keeping an eye on what happens here. In order to invest much time in developing for the device, the adoption rate has to be high enough to make it attractive. We also want to know, from a 3rd party ISV point of view, just how Palm plans to handle sales of software for the device and what things like royalty rates are going to be. We’ve really lost a lot of ground from the early days of Palm where 30% was the cut being taken by places like PalmGear and Handango. Those places are now taking more like 50-60% and do very little for promoting any applications besides the larger software houses. I’m not certain that hitching up with Sprint in the US was the best move, as I don’t think they have the greatest coverage and getting people to “switch over” just to get a Palm Pre may be challenging.
3/ In your opinion, is Palm back in the game?
As I stated in part #2, Palm is only back if they can get a LOT of devices into the hands of lots of people. They have not done anything in the way of providing early developer kits, so when the device is launched any interested developers other than those handpicked by Palm already at this point are left with no software to provide for the device. Although Palm made a great showing at CES with the Palm Pre, and made even myself wish I had one, they need to sell a lot of devices and have a lot of great 3rd party software at launch time. Palm challenge is not only to attract people to buy the device, but also needs to get attention from resource strapped 3rd party developers who are probably already hard at work on other currently available platforms. It is a chicken and egg dilemma , developers may wait until enough units are sold before developing applications but users may delay purchasing until there is a good selection of 3rd party apps.
Interestingly, I wonder if their best chance of getting software out, would be to release the SDKs, with emulators etc, asap.
Otherwise, if they don’t sell so well (or aren’t seen to), then it’ll be a self fulfilling prophecy