More Shots at Google

Someone needs to rectify the growing disparity of applications that Google has for other mobile users and what is available on the Palm units. I had hoped that the Pre would bridge this gap with the new webOS offering incentive for engineers to expand their audience reach, but so far to no avail.

I mentioned previously about my frustrations with the lack of a built in public transit on the Google Maps application. This time around it is Google Latitude that I have found out is not available.

Now, I was nowhere near as upset about this one because my interest in Latitude is minimal, resigned merely to curiosity at this point. This is in opposition to public transit on Maps, which I regard as critical to my day to day life. Latitude I wanted to use simply to explore the service and see how well the Pre's GPS functioned.

However, despite the mostly unconcern over its unavailability, it still strikes a blow to the Palm experience, whether it is Google, Palm, both or neither that share the blame. The Pre needs an open app store badly and it needs partners in the established mobile community as well. They have a great product here, but that alone is not likely to be enough to gain market share against Blackberry, Android and Apple.