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Despite all of the recent hype surrounding the recently released iPhone 3G S, the Palm Pre has also had its share of news.  In addition to the recent news about the App Market hitting almost 700,000 downloads already, we have recently seen an update to webOS, an update to Tweed as well as learned the slightly disappointing news about the webOS SDK release.

webOS updated to version 1.0.3

First up in this little Palm Pre bits post is the recent update to webOS, which was updated to version 1.0.3.  The update which is coming over-the-air measure in at 13MB and offers a few nice perks such as improvements with Google contacts, the Clock, as well as the Calendar.  Below is a full change list;

Calendar

• Events created in your Google calendar—either in Calendar on your phone or in Google online—that contain a symbol or accented character in the event name can now synchronize. Previously, including a symbol or accented character in an event name prevented the event from synchronizing.
• Changes made to Google events on the phone now sync with Google online within a few minutes.
• The sync interval for Google events has been decreased from every few hours to every 15 minutes.

Clock

• If you create a weekday alarm on a weekend, the alarm sounds only on weekdays. Previously the alarm would sound on the weekend also.

Contacts

• Changes made to Google contacts on the phone now sync with Google online within a few minutes.
• The sync interval for Google contacts has been decreased from every few hours to every 15 minutes.

Email

• Power performance in areas where wireless coverage is sporadic or unavailable has been enhanced.
• Non-SSL Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) mail servers are now supported.

Other

• Miscellaneous updates for Email, Phone, and other applications.

Twitter app Tweed updated to 0.9.7

In addition to the webOS update, we also saw an update for Tweed, the Twitter app.  This update does offer some improvements, of course it does still leave one important item out—photo upload/integration.  That said, the developer does address the issue and let us know that it is missing because “there isn’t direct support for photo upload in the Palm Mojo SDK, yet.”

Anyway, as for the other changes and additions in version 0.9.7;
Bug Fixes

• Tapping notification banner/dashboard does not load app
• Show loading spinner on refresh
• User Profile tap target was extending past photo
• several memory leaks

Features

• Shorten Urls button in compose tweet scene (urls over 30 char)
• Auto-refresh of active card (3 minutes for refresh, displays banner when there are new tweets)
• Auto-refresh will show New Tweets marker to separate newly loaded tweets from existing tweets in timeline
• Manual refresh (via button) preserves timeline and loads new tweets above existing tweets
• Conversations - icon indicates a message is “in reply to” and popup menu action shows thread
• Home timeline is checked in notifications
• Popup menu action to add marker to tweet timeline—useful for keep track of read/unread tweets.
• Show client/source of tweets

webOS SDK to be available by end of summer

This last bit of news is a little unfortunate to read.  It seems that the webOS SDK is not going to be released for everyone until the end of the summer.  According to the Palm Developer blog;

Our goal is to make the SDK available to everyone by the end of this summer, and to get there in stages:

• Beginning immediately, we’ll accelerate the growth of the early access program, expanding as quickly as resources allow. Over the next few weeks, the program will grow from hundreds to thousands of developers.
• Simultaneously, we’ll begin publishing more content outside the early access program, and we’ll launch new confidentiality rules that will allow early Mojo developers to communicate more freely with the rest of the world.
• As soon as we can, we’ll open the SDK to all legitimate requests.

Not to mention they also go on to give a friendly warning of sorts.

“As on any popular platform, we recognize that some developers will experiment in ways that cross official boundaries, but we believe that our formal offerings – and community efforts built around those offerings – will provide the best experience for the vast majority of webOS developers and users.”

Bottom line, I think just about anyone can admit that after seeing the success of the iPhone and the App Store, that in order for the Pre to really shine apps are going to need to become available.  Take for example, I am a long time Palm user and Palm fan, but am holding off on getting a Pre just for the lack of apps at this time, it is not that the iPhone is perfect by any means, it just has more that I can do.  Hopefully that will all change once the end of summer is here and the SDK is released.

Read [Palm] and [Palm] and [Pivotal Labs]