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Palm and Google both released new developer kits for their mobile web platforms, both with a focus on games, a key area of success for the iPhone App Store.

The beta version of Palm's webOS Plug-In Development Kit (PDK) is now ready for developers to download, allowing them to create plug-ins using C or C++ to enhance existing webOS apps. In particular, this is geared to advanced graphics and the games market, and the upgrade was actually unveiled at last week's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

The PDK will offer rich, high performance 3D graphics, ideal for more immersive games, according to Palm, and should encourage companies to port existing gaming apps over to webOS. Some of the early examples, ported using a pre-release version of PDK, include Need for Speed: Undercover, The Sims, Assassin's Creed, Guitar Hero 5 Mobile and Giant Fighting Robots.

"We have both the developer tools and the hardware necessary for a world class gaming experience, and an impressive portfolio of webOS game titles from top-notch developers to show for it," said Katie Mitic, senior VP of Palm's product marketing, in a statement.

However, distributing the games will require new functionality built into an upcoming update for webOS, which should be available around midyear, once the PDK is in full release. And the real tools to compete against App Store are harder to create - a huge user base, a full range of monetizing options including in-app purchasing, and a Wi-Fi only device to encourage heavy users.

Improved games were also a key focus of the third version of Google's Android Native Developer Kit (NDK), released on Monday for Android 2.x. The NDK is gradually getting more functional - it allows programmers to bypass the usual Java layer for Android development, and tap directly into the features of the phone, notably graphics power. Most Android apps run on Dalvik, Google's own Java virtual machine (JVM), which has been criticized for being non-standard and dragging down the performance of the OS. This is becoming a critical consumer issue, as Android moves into high powered devices with PC-like functionality and graphics, such as the 1GHz Nexus One and HTC Desire.

With the NDK, Google is steadily allowing more direct communications with the hardware through the NDK interfaces, although a Dalvik app is still required. The biggest change in release 3 is support for the standard graphics interface, OpenGL ES 2.0, also supported by the iPhone 3GS.

Despite the importance of games to Apple, books now outnumber games in the App Store, for the first time since the storefront opened in mid-2008, according to Mobclix. The store contains more than 26,500 books, representing 18.6% of its 142,000 applications, while games are 17.6%, with 25,000 choices.

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