I think the folks at Palm had a pretty good thing going when they announced the WebOS platform last year, but I think they missed the point on software. No new Smartphone platform has a chance of breaking through until it can get to a critical mass of applications. Today the marketplace of applications has been created, pricing has played out and the best ones have already bubbled to the top on one platform, i.e. the Apple iPhone. If there is an easy way for iPhone developers to port over their apps to the WebOS platform where the incremental cost of deploying on an additional platform is low enough, Palm has a shot at getting to that critical mass. I know, code translators are never perfect, but some tool that gets you a bit farther than half way might help.

Palm was betting on winning over a number of web developers due to how similar the platform is to developing for the web, but I guess it didn’t really court the mobile developers who already understood and internalized the different development and operational challenges as well as the economics of mobile apps. I would’ve loved to have seen Palm come up as a third or fourth front of competition in this space.