I have been using the PALM Pre for about five days now, and I think it is fair to say that I am truly impressed by this fantastic device (review coming real soon).  In fact, I have become one of the Pre’s biggest advocates around the JAMM water cooler…with not notable exception.  Although the Pre includes an App Catalog, Palm has not allowed developers to significantly populate it.

Although the Palm Pre was officially released on the Sprint network about a month ago, the SDK was only publicly unveiled yesterday, meaning that only a handful of lucky developers had an opportunity to create applications for the Palm.  In fact, the app Catalog is currently limited to only 30 apps, and is completely unrepresented in many categories.

Now that the SDK has been released to developers, I am sure that over time, this situation will be rectified.  But the question still remains…why wait?  Given the popularity of the iTunes App Store on the iPhone platform and the rate at which both great and terrible apps are coming out over there, why wouldn’t Palm release a more fully stocked App Catalog.  Given the fact that the SDK was privately released to a small group of developers months ago, it could not be argued that the SDK was simply not ready.

One of the biggest arguments I have heard from my iPhone bearing friends is a comparison of the App Store to the App Catalog.  The App Store, they say, has hundreds of iPhone apps, the App Catalog has less than three dozen.  I can’t argue with the numbers.  Though I can point out that for the first year of its life, the iPhone (officially) had no 3rd party apps, while Windows Mobile had thousands of apps available.  Plus, the iTunes App Store has been around for over a year now, the Palm Pre App Catalog has not even been officially released.

All of that being said, though, I still have to question Palm’s strategy here.  They designed this phone to compete against the iPhone.  To be a so called iPhone Killer.  They designed an app store to compete against the iTunes App Store.  So why not have it full loaded and ready to go so that new Palm Pre users opening the App Catalog for the first time are not met with mostly empty shelves.   Hopefully this will not be the miscalculation which sinks an otherwise fantastic platform.

In the days leading up to the official launch of the Palm Pre App Catalog, I can only say that I hope Palm will learn from Apple when it sets its pricing structure.  It is extremely easy to hit purchase on a 99 cent app or game. Not so much on one which is $9.99 or above.  I think one of the great moves Apple made was making the apps in the App Store entirely affordable, with an extremely high percentage of them rolling in at $2.99 or less.  Take it from me, Palm, that is an example to follow.

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