Palm Press — Apps are Flooding in; User Sues Over Data Loss
It is Thursday and that means it’s time for another Palm Press. Palm Press is our weekly look at the world of Palm. Last week I reported the App Catalog was up to 525 apps, and today it’s already at a “whopping” 636. That’s a 20 percent increase in just a week, so maybe Palm is cranking up the approval process to get apps out the door and in the Catalog.
A while back we reported that Palm Profile backups were getting corrupted, resulting in data loss for some Pre owners. One owner has taken particular offense at the loss and has filed suit against Palm. The Pre owner hopes to turn the suit into a class action suit. At issue is the inability to restore his personal data to a replacement Pre supplied when he returned a defective Pre that had been duly backed up. No doubt the fact that this was his fourth defective Pre played a role in the decision to sue.
There are a log of blogs on the WordPress platform, this blog is one, and it is great news that a webOS WordPress app should enter a beta “soon.” Mobile WordPress apps make it possible to blog and do other housekeeping chores from the phone. A webOS version of the WordPress app will be a very useful tool for Pre and Pixi owners who blog, although it will be coming from a third-party developer — not officially from WordPress — and will require a WordPress plug-in installed on the server side.
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Well, when 40-50 of the apps are single-team sports applications, it’s easy for the number to increase a ton.
Seriously, there’s “Basketball Fans – ” for every team, and “Hockey Fans” and “Baseball Fans” for a handful of teams as well.
True, but the same logic applies to Apple. When 30% of your 100,000 apps are fart apps or news aggregators, you can boast big numbers (even if few people will find half of it to be interesting).
Agreed – there is junk everywhere. It’s nice to see the numbers increase but some apps are still missing. How about an app from a company in even worse shape than Palm, Sirius XM. How about Dropbox, Fring, E-Trade, or an old Palm OS fave – Pocket Tunes. And has anyone seen Skype? I would be interested in knowing how many Palm Pre Owners also own an iPod Touch. We will know that the app catalog is getting closer when we forget to bring the Touch with us when we leave the house. I always pick up the Touch first.
Forget skype..I simply want a podcast downloader.
Another way to look at it, when Palm had just 10 apps in the catalog and the number increased to 20, there was a 100% increase in the number of apps. The percentage increase has been decreasing over time… (There’s lies, damn lies, and statistics.)
With CES coming up, it interesting to note how huge the Pre buzz was this time last year. Did it live up to the hype? Masterful marketing indeed.