Pre SDK Distro Expands; Palm OS Emulation Touted

Eschewing CTIA for their announcement, Palm spoke at the Web 2.0 Expo on Wednesday night, and announced a number of things, including the fact that Palm OS emulation will be available on the Palm Pre, via third party developer MotionApps.

Of course, you'll have to pay for the emulator, which they call Classic. There's no pricing or release information yet, but from what I understand, the emulation doesn't run directly in the Palm Web OS. It runs in a sandbox. Thus, it would work best with self-contained applications (like perhaps a game). According to Palm's press release, Classic apps won't have access to core Web OS functionality, so apps that tightly integrate with Palm OS might not fare well.

Still, for those with tons of Palm OS apps sitting around, this is great news.

Additionally, Palm announced it was expanding its its early access program for the Palm Mojo Software Development Kit (SDK), and would begin taking applications from additional developers.

Finally, Palm spoke about a new cloud-based service they are calling the Mojo Messaging Service:

When the Mojo SDK is broadly released later this year, it will include a developer-facing offering called the Mojo Messaging Service, an XMPP publish/subscribe service. The Mojo Messaging Service is an elegant, standards-based way to exchange information over the Internet. When new information is available, it is "published" to the cloud and all interested parties who are subscribers are notified that new information is available. This will allow developers to push live content to their applications or services. The Mojo Messaging Service initially will have a limited feature set and service level that will evolve over time.

Sounds somewhat MobileMe-ish, doesn't it, though it sounds like Palm is going for very basic support at first.

What Palm still didn't say was when the Pre would launch, though everyone still points to a 1H09 release (probably June).