Palm Brings 3D Gaming to the webOS

Palm's webOS was created with a focus on the Web, but users wanted high-end games, too. Palm has now answered this request by modifying its operating system to allow for 3D gaming.

Several games have been released as well, including EA Mobile's "Need for Speed Undercover", and The Sims 3".

Other 3D games that have just launched for the Palm Pre include:

• "MONOPOLY" (EA Mobile)
• "Asphalt 5: Elite Racing" (Gameloft)
• "Let's Golf!" (Gameloft)
• "Glyder 2" (Glu Mobile)
• "X-Plane" (Laminar Research)

Five other mobile games were also introduced: EA Mobile's "Tetris," "Sudoku," and "SCRABBLE," and Gameloft's "The Oregon Trail" and "Brain Challenge."

Palm announced at this week's Consumer Electronics Show that all of these games are available now in the on-device App Catalog.

New Developer Tools
The developers introducing these games had early access to the new Palm webOS Plug-in Development Kit (PDK), which extends the standard Software Development Kit (SDK) with a set of tools and APIs that let developers write plug-ins for their applications. These can be written in C and C++, and allow for much more robust apps,

Until now, developers had to depend on simpler programming tools. As its name suggests, the webOS has a focus on the Internet, and the tools developers use to create software are web-related ones: HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. These work well for creating some types of apps, but they aren't what someone needs to develop graphics-intensive games.

Most of Palm's top competitors have a wide variety of games available for them, especially Apple's iPhone. The paucity of games for the Palm Pre and Pixi is surely hurting these devices in the market. The webOS PDK will help level the playing field.

"Recent improvements to Palm webOS represent major advancements in enabling world-class mobile gaming," said Travis Boatman, vice president of Worldwide Studios for EA Mobile. "These innovations have allowed us to quickly bring our best IP to the platform."

A public beta version of the webOS PDK is scheduled to be available to all developers in March.

Source: Palm