O’Reilly and Palm just announced (and released) Chapter 1 of a Palm Pre / Mojo SDK book.

Here are my thoughts as I read through the chapter.

• Much of what we’ve seen the native apps do in various videos is possible for 3rd party apps. Notifications, running in the background, etc.
• 3rd Party apps have access to a bunch of services to add value to the built in functionality.
• The Prototype AJAX library is bundled with WebOS.
• Developers can make headless palm pre apps that interact with the dashboard and notifications but have no card.
• When an app is deleted by the user, so is any info it put into contacts or calendar.
• webOS System Architecture Diagram (attached below)
• “Video and audio capture is not supported in the initial webOS
  products, but is inherently supported by the architecture. “
• “The Palm Developer Tools (PDT) are installed from the SDK and include targets for
  Linux, Windows (XP/Vista) and Mac OS X.”
• The document mentions a fluid physics engine!
• The document also says 3rd parties can build apps which take up multiple cards (1 for each activity) similar to what we’ve seen the mail app do with composition windows.
• There is a hyper optimized list widget included in the SDK. We’ve seen how useful that can be in the iPhone SDK, so it’s good to see that Palm is investing there as well.
• “A service is an on-device server for any resource, data, or configuration that is exposed through the framework for use within an application. The service can be performed by the native OS (in the case of device services), an application, or by a server in the cloud. The model is very powerful as evidenced by the initial set of offered services. The Services differ from the rest of the framework because they are called through a single controller function, serviceRequest. The request passes a JSON object specific to the called service and specifying callbacks for success and failure of the service re- quest. “

With all of this talk about the iPhone and the Palm Pre I often wonder how the G1 and future Android phones will stack up. I’ve had limited interactions with the G1, but I’ve read lots of conflicting reviews. It’s nice to see a review from someone with the kind of holistic understanding of mobile phones that Jonathan Greene has.

Read Jonathan’s review over at atmaspheric endeavors. Pay close attention to his positive comments about the browser and his negative comments about the battery.