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December 16, 2008 9:34 AM PST

Palm releases its own app store. So what?

by Jessica Dolcourt

In the year since Palm released the Centro as an attempt to revive its lagging business, I've barely heard a whisper about new applications or energy for the Treo and Centro lines. Yet late Monday night, the device maker released its own app store download for Centro and Treo users to more easily access the applications.

The arrival of Palm's free app store--for both Windows Mobile and Palm operating systems--was undoubtedly spurred on by the success of Apple's iPhone App Store, Google's Android Market, and the upcoming BlackBerry app store that's slated to debut in March.

Palm App Store on Centro(Credit: Palm Software)

Palm's nexus of downloads includes over 5,000 applications, about a fifth of them freebies. Yet with the exception of Facebook, few appear to be the fresh takes on multimedia and social networking that have defined modern applications. A press release trumpets Nursing Central, Encyclopedia Britannica, Pac-Man, Tetris, and Fish Tycoon as its hot apps.

While Palm may hope its storefront will coax developers to submit variations of their innovative iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android apps to the store, the offering so far adds little strength to Palm's lagging market position.

Still, getting an app store out before BlackBerry does provide some credibility. More importantly, it will undoubtedly please existing Palm users, the most important ingredient for Palm's continued existence in the vicious and volatile mobile marketplace.

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by rcrow490 December 16, 2008 2:01 PM PST
This is not a new Palm app store. You download an app to your Palm unit which takes you to PocketGear's website.
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by bonesbautista December 17, 2008 3:35 PM PST
What rcrow wrote - the new Palm app store is the old Palm app store, pretty much unchanged for four years. Yawn.
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by hedge717 December 18, 2008 1:56 PM PST
I go to http://www.pdatopsoft.com Unlike PGear or Handango they give 20% OFF this holiday season.
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by JBSimmons December 31, 2008 12:52 AM PST
They were very good with the PDA market. Got top dollar for them too. I still use my Palm Tungsten E2 and bought a spare on sale because the company got "sick" too many times. Why did they have to screw it up with addition of a phone?

There is a niche market for a PDA WITHOUT the phone function. The Tungsten E2 and the T1 were two of the best products they ever made. I can't live without my PDA. With a SDHC card, it stores more than several phone type devices combined. I can write on the PDA screen and have it convert to text to sync with my laptop. This is still a great setup. The E2 is an all metal device, designed to last for a long time.

I always use a screen protection film and got the accessories. The email specials stopped quite some time ago. I guess I should order spare batteries before they go out of business, huh?
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