Sure, it would have been better if these features were in a 1.0 release, but Palm doesn't need to take away Apple customers right now. There are a lot of people

Sure, it would have been better if these features were in a 1.0 release, but Palm doesn't need to take away Apple customers right now. There are a lot of people who don't want AT&T service or don't want to pay the extra for the iPhone plan. So the market is large and growing, especially as more people buy the Pre (and Palm's upcoming devices for AT&T and Verizon). Sure apps won't not be as "rich" at first, but there is still going to be a demand for the simpler ones. It may be harder to have, and get profits from, a "hit" for the iPhone. However, I bet your expected return on a simple Pre app is higher than releasing an iPhone app. The app store is so big it's hard to get noticed. You could even just clone existing iPhone apps. They sold once, they will sell again. Once the SDK is advanced enough to let you have more access to the hardware, the market will be ready for those apps. Sure it'd be great to have them now, but they'll come. In the meantime, you can build the easier apps. I suppose if you really wanted to, you could get access to it as long as you're willing to do a little reverse engineering. Some ideas: 1. Direct Framebuffer (http://predev.wikidot.com/directfb http://predev.wikidot.com/directfb). I don't know much about OpenGL programming, but this might be able to be used. Doom runs on it, so perhaps there's a way through that. 2. The built in apps must execute some type of native code. For example, when the phone app initiates a call. Does it somehow make a call to a local shell script or app? You could use that to write stuff in whatever language you wanted and have it talk back to js app. The tools are available to compile executables for the platform. Be the first to figure this out and you've got a great head start, because I'm confident this is how Palm will do it. Or even release your app outside the App Store; you don't need to "root" a Pre to install an app. A person downloads an "installer" on their computer, plugs in their Pre, and runs the program. It installs it on the phone over USB. No hacking required. You'd have to do payment processing yourself obviously. Note: I also recognize that games make up a large number of iPhone app purchases, but there are still a lot of games you could make for the Pre with the SDK's limitations.