- Is there any legal restriction against using the word "Palm" as part of the name of a Palm OS application; for example, "PalmCheckers"? It occurs to me that there should be more apps named that way if there weren't a rule about it.
Yes, there is. Please read http://www.palmsource.com/about/trademarks.html and http://www.palmone.com/us/company/trademark.html for details on Palm trademark usage.
- I noticed some people say they're certified Palm developers. How does one become certified? What are the benefits?
There is a certification exam; it's generally been available at DevCons and you can sign up to take it at testing centers. Details at http://www.palmos.com/dev/certification/.
- Is there a good market for Palm programmers? So far I'm just doing this as a hobby. I'm a J2EE (enterprise Java) programmer at my day job. But I'm curious about the prospects.
Right now, there seems to be a lot of contract work available for Palm OS developers, especially people with network programming or multimedia experience. I get a couple of calls a week from recruiters; it certainly helps to also have experience with other mobile platforms -- some who knows J2ME and can port applications written to that to the Palm OS platform could do really good things right now in the smartphone world.
-- Ben Combee, Senior Software Engineer, palmOne, Inc. "Combee on Palm OS" weblog: http://palmos.combee.net/ Developer Forum Archives: http://news.palmos.com/read/all_forums/
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