I was working at HP during that time.
They sent a company wide email asking people to develop applications for the OS, and receive a Palm Pre for free.
I created an app that simply turns off the screen, and called it a mirror app (because you could see your reflection). I really enjoyed my free Palm Pre.
I tried resurrecting it a few years ago but couldn’t find a replacement battery after the original died.
Wasn’t much to it actually. I was working in a team trying to create hp’s first SAAS offering for workflow management.
I was the “webmaster” specialist at that time, and hearing the news that HP bought palmOS which was based on JavaScript made me really excited.
However, during that time, HP was notorious for replacing its CEO on a yearly basis.
After 1 year working on our project, 30 person team, the CEO was replaced and our project was scrapped.
They gave me 2 months to do nothing (actually played gears of war in the game room), and then moved me to another team where we spent 8 months waiting while the managers argued on what we should be doing . After that I quit.
We always knew that the software side of hp provides barely 10% of the revenue while the rest is printers.
It really wasn’t a surprise they failed with the Palm purchase.
This was an offer to non HP folks as well - if you were an established developer, you could get a free Pre2. I was a recipient of said free device, but I did have several legit apps in the store because honestly WebOS was really fun to write code for! Their developer relations were excellent for a while - it was a really fun community to be part of for a bit. Shout out to Chuq, he was great.
My parents got a cheap Touchpad when they were getting rid of them, and used it for years. Especially after people got AOSP running on it.