Remember the Palm Treo, Yeah it had an app market

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The iPhone has over 100,000 apps, the android has over 20,000 and the palm has about 1,000 apps in the market. did you know that there are apps for almost every phone out there?

mobile computing on smartphones has been around for a long time. Probably the most well known smartphone was the palm Treo. That phone was the first to take people from owning a cellphone and a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant). I owned a couple of them and would install apps all the time. There was no app market, we had to get them the old fashion way, by searching the internet and downloading them from personal homepages. I was able to find a disk once with about 700 apps on it. Everything from chess to SF Bart maps to GEOtagging. Of course, it was nothing like it is today, but don’t forget, apps have been around for a long time.

I remember buying Tom Tom Navigation for my wife’s Treo. Worked great and was a cheap alternative to buying a separate navigation device for her car. Of course it was all disks, there was no way to get maps on the fly with a download, and you had to use an external GPS unit to receive the location signals, but that was just the standard a few years ago.

I use to make apps with a program called Codewarrior. Codewarrior for palm was discontinued a few years ago due to the fall in popularity of the Palm Treo, and the Palm OS. The new Palm apps run on a hybrid HTML language… but has yet to gain any serious following. I have only seen one Palm Pre on the streets.

Codewarrior basically let you make forms and pages with wrappers to handle all the behind the scenes activities. It was crude, but you could definitely build apps and distribute them to other users without having to jailbreak or hack the phone.

It makes me think how palm, and the earlier smartphone companies didn’t see how smartphone apps would change the way we use smartphones?

Why did it take a company like Apple to unleash the next evolution in apps. Even with inferior data plans from 5-6 years ago, the companies should have still seen this coming. Many times I complain about new technologies and new media getting a lot of attention, when in reality the technology has been around for years. All it take is a tipping point I guess for them to hit critical mass and society to find a use for them.