With their announcement of the Pre last week, Palm has placed their bet that great mobile applications can be built using the same open web technologies that drive the desktop environment today. Web applications that run on modern desktop browsers are constantly pushing the envelope of the types of applications that no longer require a proprietary platform-specific SDK.
When Apple first launched the iPhone in 2007 their first answer to developers was similar to Palm’s new OS. Apple gave a long talks at its 2007 Worldwide Developers Conference about how you can build great applications using standard web technologies. Unlike Palm’s webOS the iPhone web SDK was severely lacking in many areas. Apple has corrected some of these shortcomings in the subsequent releases of their mobile browser. Mobile Safari now supports multi-touch gestures, basic rotation tracking, and hardware accelerated CSS animations. Unfortunately, Apple’s open web SDK still lacks many of the most critical features that would allow developers to build applications that take full advantage of the mobile environment.