I read over at the NYTimes.com that writer Matt Richtel interviewed Jon Rubinstein following Palm's press conference. Rubinstein talked about how important the application developers are to the success of the Palm Pre.

Palm's competition such as Apple and RIM have many application developers. So did Palm when they were in the glory days of being the pioneer of the smartphone. The number of applications grew in astounding numbers for the Palm OS. When Palm's Garnet OS became stagnant, many Palm developers had to move on, and we saw the apps for the iPhone and the BlackBerry grow.

Palm was very smart to have changed with the new Palm Pre. According to the NYTimes article, Rubinstein argued that Palm's new operating system, the WebOS, is easy to develop for, and relies on HTML, JavaScript, AJAX, and other program environments that developers are familiar with. He also added that Palm has a long-standing relationship with developers.

From the article:

"There's a large, very loyal Palm developer base," he said. The key to success is "you reinvigorate those developers." He declined to provide details of Palm's efforts to court programmers, saying the company was focused on getting the Pre introduced in the first half of this year.

I've already seen some developers in the forums asking about the new Palm Pre and developing for it. With the Palm's new WebOS being so easy to develop for, I'm hoping to see developers flocking to it and really giving us some wonderful applications. If I was a developer, I'd be very excited to dig in and get in the game. Hopefully Palm will get back many of those developers from the Garnet days who had to move on.