This week at CES Palm finally announced its new phone, the Pre, powered by its new Linux based OS, the webOS (spanish speakers will have a laugh with this name), which is based on a HTML/JS stack for application development. Ars Technica publishes two articles with in-depth information on the Pre's hardware (it's nice to finally see mainstream OMAP3/Cortex A8 devices) and its app store and SDK (links via OSNews).

Personally I have my doubts about HTML/JS based development. In performance terms it won't be able to compete with the iPhone, which has fully native application support (the APIs may be crippled, but that's a different problem). With the Dalvik VM in Android apparently being extremely slow it looks like only the iPhone, Symbian and WinMo platforms are willing to share the full power of the hardware with third party developers.