Palm's Pre Won't Run Existing PalmOS Apps; Store to Be Called the "App Catalog"

Palm introduced its new Palm Web OS and the Palm Pre on Thursday at CES, and one question I had was whether or not old apps would run on the device. The answer to that appears to be no.

Past info (and I mean, when Palm first started working on its new Linux-based OS) was that the new OS would emulate PalmOS, so that existing apps would run on it. While that would have given Palm a huge ready-made catalog of apps, they decided against it.

"We're not emulating [applications from] the old Palm OS, but will allow third-party emulation," said Pam Deziel, vice president of product management said, in an interview Friday at CES. "We're figuring on having developers do great applications."

So, third-party emulation is possible. It might be asking too much for someone to come up with a general purpose emulator, as opposed to emulating their own application. According to Palm, all that's necessary to write code for the Palm Web OS is a knowledge of CSS, HTML and / or Javascript.

Meanwhiles Palm's developer site (PDN) notes a few things about the new Palm Web OS. For one, the "App Store" is going to get the name App Catalog. Well, after all, App Store was taken.

The SDK will be called Mojo, and is currently in private pre-release. For those currently left out, it will be available later this year as a free download from PDN.

Palm desperately needs this to be a hit, and a key to that will be as many apps running on it as possible at launch. Given that, I'm somewhat surprised the SDK is in private pre-release. Google was pretty open about its Android SDK, and Palm should give access to it to everyone, if they want success.