CES 2010: Palm Pre Gets 3D Games from EA, Gameloft
Palm introduced the first 3D games for Palm Pre at its press conference in Las Vegas
LAS VEGAS – With Apple dominating the portable games space thanks to its App Store and thousands of videogames, Palm used CES 2010 to go virtual. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Palm showed off 3D games for its Palm webOS platform. Palm has partnered with leading mobile game developers like EA Mobile, Gameloft, Glu Mobile, and Laminar Research to bring the first batch of games to its Palm Pre customers. Demonstrated at Palm's CES event, the games are now available in the Palm App Catalog for Palm Pre customers.
"We are very excited about the potential of webOS as a platform for mobile 3D gaming," said Katie Mitic, senior vice president, product marketing, Palm. "This is a key application category, and we've worked closely with some of the leading game developers to deliver a great game experience for our customers."
The first seven games available for Palm Pre are EA Mobile’s Need for Speed Undercover, The Sims 3 and Monopoly, Gameloft’s Asphalt 5: Elite Racing and Let’s Golf, Glu Mobile’s Glyder 2 and Laminar Research’s X-Plane.
Five other mobile games were also introduced, including EA Mobile's Tetris, Sudoku, and Scrabble, and Gameloft's The Oregon Trail and Brain Challenge.
"Recent improvements to Palm webOS represent major advancements in enabling world-class mobile gaming," said Travis Boatman, vice president of Worldwide Studios for EA Mobile. "These innovations have allowed us to quickly bring our best IP to the platform."
The developers that introduced these early titles had early access to the Palm webOS Plug-in Development Kit (PDK), which extends the Palm webOS Software Development Kit (SDK) with a set of tools, documentation and APIs that let developers write plug-ins for their webOS applications. The PDK lets developers easily integrate C and C++ code into their webOS applications, enabling new functionality, including immersive 3D games. A public beta version of the webOS PDK is scheduled to be available to all developers in March.
"The performance of the platform allowed us to create these great games in a limited timeframe," said Baudouin Corman, vice president of publishing, Americas, Gameloft. "webOS allows us to deliver an outstanding gaming experience, and we look forward to bringing our best games to Palm customers worldwide.""We expect the plug-in model to play an important role in the evolution of the webOS platform, just as plug-ins have with web browsers," said Mitic. "And with this plug-in, we are making it super-simple for developers to bring the hottest games to webOS."
The Palm App Catalog currently offers more than 1,000 webOS applications for download. Palm's unique over-the-air model also makes it easy for customers to get webOS updates and new features delivered directly to their phones. For example, at CES today, Palm announced that video recording, editing and sharing capabilities will soon be available for users of webOS phones. This new video capability will be delivered automatically to current and future Palm Pre and Palm Pixi products via an over-the-air update.
Palm also demonstrated Flash content in the browser on a Palm Pre and expects a free Adobe Flash Player 10.1 plug-in to be posted to the Palm App Catalog in the coming months. Palm expects webOS to be one of the first mobile platforms to support the full Flash Player in the web browser.
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About the Author
John Gaudiosi
Editor-in-Chief
John Gaudiosi has been covering videogames for the past 17 years for outlets like The Washington Post, CNET, Wired Magazine and CBS.com. He has focused on the convergence of entertainment and videogames for outlets like Video Business, Home Media Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, The Hollywood Reporter and Variety. He currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of Gamerlive.TV and is also a freelance game columnist for Reuters and writes for outlets like Playboy Magazine, NVISION Magazine, GamePro Magazine, Official PlayStation Magazine, EGM Now, Maxim.com, AOL GameDaily.com, GeForce.com, and Yahoo! Games. John also serves as the video game expert for NBC in Washington D.C. John was named one of the Top 50 Game Journalists in the world by Next-Gen.biz in 2007. He is the co-author of Scholastic Books' How to Get into Videogames, Prima Publishing's Madden: Twenty Years of Videogame Football and Electronic Arts: The Official History.
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