Palm, Software | featured news

Hewlett Packard donates its mobile system software, WebOS, to the open source community and says it will continue to invest in the project. The tech company acquired the software when it bought the smartphone maker Palm for $1.2bn (£767m) last year. HP used the code to power its short-lived range Touchpad tablet computers before it abandoned the product line.

Hewlett-Packard Co is looking to sell Palm's webOS mobile software platform, a deal that could fetch hundreds of millions of dollars but less than the $1.2 billion that HP paid last year, four sources close to the matter said.

Palm Pre users rejoice: a new version of webOS, 1.2.0, is now available. It’s about 79 megabytes heavy, and it brings several new important features, one of them being support for paid app purchases from the App Catalog.

Prepare yourself for the onslaught of tip calculators and flashlights, friends, because the Mojo SDK for Pre's WebOS is out and ready to rock. You can download it right here and start coding immediately, if not sooner.

Our major beef thus far has been the Pre's fairly sparse app store and this promises to open things up considerably.