Hackers Dissect Palm Pre, WebOS

Network World — A week after the release of the Palm Pre, hackers are eagerly dissecting and sifting through the webOS software that powers it.

Palm Pre vs. Apple iPhone: How they stack up

Free Palm Pre Apps: Eight Great Downloads

It’s unclear at this point how Palm (and in some cases Sprint) will respond. Over the weekend, Palm reportedly asked one developer forum to end discussions of how to hack the phone so a notebook PC could connect to it, via USB cable or wireless, and use the Pre as a cellular modem.

The Web site, Pre Dev Wiki, announced it had been “politely cautioned by Palm (in private, and not by any legal team)” that tethering talk would likely spark complaints from Sprint, the Pre’s sole U.S. carrier. Palm then “would be forced to react against the people running the IRC channel and this wiki.”

The post triggered a wave of online speculation, as developers read different meanings into it. PC World’s Ian Paul sees the mild language as evidence of Palm being friendly. Yet Nick Marshall, at Cell Fanatic, sees the same caution as proof that Palm “will be aggressively combating any WebOS hacking.”

Palm has not yet responded to a Network World inquiry about this event, or about the company’s stance with regard to webOS hacking in general.

Palm seems to be making webOS updates mandatory, through automatic background downloads and a requirement that they be installed within a week of the download (apparently the phone can install the updates automatically after that), according to Nilay Patel at Engadet, who referenced Palm support documents. “Sure, we can understand why Palm would want all of its devices to be updated, and we know that a lot of webOS system foundations are in flux while the Mojo SDK is being finalized, but forced updates seem extremely heavy-handed to us,” he writes.

But in the meantime, Pre hacking has apparently become the principal entertainment for a sizeable number of folks. Some of them have managed to port a version of Doom, the classic PC-based first-person 3D shooter game, to the new Pre. That’s a big deal, says Eric Marthinsen, partner with Lexington, Mass.-based Agile Commerce, a custom software house that’s been working with Palm’s webOS and Mojo SDK.

“It does demonstrate that whoever got it working was able to interface with the system at a pretty low level,” he says. “I have seen Doom for the iPhone, but on the iPhone you have lower-level access, which is why there are a ton of 3D apps for it. The Pre doesn't really have any 3D capabilities that are exposed through Mojo. I'm extremely eager to develop some 3D apps for it, so this is especially interesting to me.”

Continue Reading