February 1st, 2009
Sling Media taking a wait and see approach to the Palm WebOS
I’ve been using a Slingbox and the SlingPlayer Mobile clients for years, but last year I moved to the Hava player because they have free Nokia Internet Tablet and S60 clients. Slingbox now has a SlingPlayer Mobile client for selected S60 devices, but it does not work on the very popular Nokia E71. Dave Zatz sent me an email notice about a new post he wrote on the apparent hesitancy of Sling Media to develop a SlingPlayer Mobile client for the upcoming Palm WebOS while they look to focus on the Google Android platform next.
Check out what the Slingbox beta manager, MegaZone, stated in a recent post, including the following:
As has been pointed out, the actual development information hasn’t been released yet so it is premature to be talking about development. From what we have seen it looks like webOS is an all-new environment, so it would need an all-new SPM which would not be a small task. At this time we’re taking a wait and see approach to webOS. When it ships we’ll watch the adoption rate and decide if it warrants developing SPM for webOS or not. Keep in mind it has currently been announced for one device (the Pre) on one carrier (#3 and currently falling) so it remains to be seen if and when it appears on additional devices and carriers for the worldwide market and achieves a significant market share.
I understand a bit about hesitancy to spend money developing for an unknown and new operating system, especially from a company who hasn’t had a good track record the last couple of years. There were several companies in the Palm presentation at CES, like Facebook and DataViz, who announced partnerships and must be working on applications at the moment. The public WebOS SDK isn’t available yet, but Palm must be working with major software developers to have at least a minimal amount of software available at launch. SlingPlayer Mobile seems like it would be a perfect application to show off the power of the CPU in the Palm Pre and I personally wish Sling Media would make an effort to work with Palm on this new OS. I won’t be buying a Palm Pre because of the Sprint exclusivity, but will be buying a GSM version when available.
Matthew Miller is an avid mobile device enthusiast who works during the day as a professional naval architect in Seattle. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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