Two announcements caught our eye this week – Palm finally announced that it will officially open the doors to its Palm webOS developer program in December, and RIM announced BlackBerry Widget Packager 1.0 Beta 1, a new tool that allows web developers to package up their web assets into BlackBerry Widgets (i.e. small, discrete, standalone web applications that use HTML, CSS and JavaScript). Both of these announcements signal that the wireless application wars are heating up! This is both good and bad … if you are developer you will now have more choice than ever of platforms on which to build your applications and try to tap into lucrative installed bases of premium priced devices. If you are a user in theory you will have more apps to choose from both paid and unpaid. Unfortunately, if you are a user by now you may be severely disappointed by the masses of truly worthless apps out there and while one person’s worthless app may be another’s wonderful new app the problem most of us face is telling the two apart before we download them to our device.

Nevertheless, we are particularly pleased to see Palm jump into the app wars. We definitely think their webOS platform is the coolest and most truly innovative mobile OS platform on the market today, and has to our mind so far met with way too little industry applause. We believe that if Palm’s developer program takes off all this is about to change and we may finally see some truly interesting, worthwhile applications emerge that can truly grab the interest of both business and prosumer users.

RIM’s BlackBerry Widget also should spark up developers. RIM explains that its widgets will look, behave and have the same security mechanisms as a native BlackBerry application. They can be installed on a BlackBerry smartphone like any native application and can be extended to use device-specific information and data using the BlackBerry Widget APIs. Sounds cool …we’ll wait to see what gets released and how well it is received by BlackBerry afecionados which typically tend to be a pretty staid group of folks.