Sunnyvale-based mobile phone maker Palm, the developer of Palm Pre and its webOS platform, also released into the wild a software portal for the new operating system, the App Catalog, which kicked off with only 18 applications available at launch. In the meantime, a few more have been added, and the number of apps now available totals 30.

Even so, it seems that the portal it becoming more and more popular among users, and the number of downloads for the software solutions available with the App Catalog is rising at enhanced speeds. To be more precise, the application downloads totaled a little more than 660,000 on June 17, while on June 20, two weeks after launch, the number of downloads rose above 800,000.

The App Catalog went live nine days before the launch, and included only four applications at that time, Classic, Sudoku, Today Show, and WHERE, while the number rose to 30 at the end of the first week of availability and remained unchanged ever since. The number of applications is not impressive at all, on the contrary, yet this can be easily explained through the fact that Palm hasn't released the webOS SDK just yet, and only a small number of developers have had access to it until now.

At the same time, most of the applications available on the portal are in beta, except for Classic by MotionApps, which features a version higher than 1. This is the result of the fact that, initially, Palm considered launching the Pre without the App Catalog, but changed its mind shortly after. The good part is that the Palm Pre is only the second handset in the world to be launched along with an applications portal for it, following the HTC Dream, which went live last year along with the Android Market software portal.

For what it's worth, Palm seems determined to accelerate the development process of applications for its new platform, and already announced the launch of its open source portal and that the webOS SDK would become available worldwide before the end of the summer. This means that both the content in the App Catalog and the number of downloads are likely to receive a great boost in the near future, so stay tuned to learn more details.