Palm expands Mojo SDK program, drops Pre hints at Web 2.0 Expo

Two and a half months after the unveiling of the Pre and many, many hours after tormenting visitors to their blog with the promise of a big announcement, Palm on Wednesday fought the April Fools urge and told the world more about what to expect for the hotly anticipated handset.

Blogging from the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, where Palm's Michael Abbott (senior vice president of Applications Software and Services) and eBay's Mark Carges jointly gave the evening "High Order Bit" keynote, the company revealed that the beloved Pandora music service and Fandango will both be available for the handset. That's apt to cheer the civilians, who were nonetheless hoping for news on obscure matters such as pricing and ship date today.

But first, the developers need some love, and love today they got. The big news is that the company expanded signups for the SDK today, simultaneous to the announcement; the bigger news is that the company will start choosing developers from that signup list as early as tomorrow. The company also revealed that MotionApps will make a PalmOS emulator available at Pre's launch (not to be confused with pre-launch) -- something that ought to cheer up the longtime faithful. (Your writer is greatly gratified to think that her favorite astronomy app might be usable on the new phone.)

Finally, it wouldn't be Web 2.0 without some sort of cloud nod, and Palm announced that it's introducing a set of "integrated cloud services" for developers. That Mojo Messaging Service should allow for, as the blog put it, "live interactions between users and applications both on and off the cloud."