Dec 28, 2010 13:40 GMT  ·  By

In June 2009, Sprint customers had the opportunity to get the first taste of the new webOS mobile operating system from the mobile phone maker Palm, which was loaded at the time on the Palm Pre smartphone, and which enjoyed at launch a number of around 30 applications.

One year and a half later, there are five device models that run under the webOS platform, and a number of 5,000 applications available in the app store for them.

This is the official number, of course, since the range of unofficial applications for the platform, or homebrew solutions, makes that figure be a larger one, as MobileCrunch notes in a recent article.

In all fairness, the total number of software solutions available for the Palm Pre, Pre Plus, Pre 2, Pixi and Pixi Plus owners out there is not astonishing.

The App Catalog needed eighteen months to reach a milestone that the Android Market reached in about six months after launch, while the new Windows Phone Marketplace that accompanies Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7 platform managed to reach in roughly two months.

When compared to the over 300k apps available in the Apple App Store, or the impressively high number of solutions in the Android Market, these figures seem pretty small.

However, next year is expected to bring a series of changes in this area as well, with much more webOS devices being released into the wild, including a tablet PC from HP, and new, high-end smartphones.

Undoubtedly, the fact that Palm was one the verge of disappearing from the market when it launched the first webOS handset had a great impact on the development community.

Earlier this year, HP purchased Palm, and announced plans to invest a lot in the development of the webOS platform, a move that would certainly help the app ecosystem grow as well.

The first step on this road should be made in early January at CES 2011, when HP is expected to unveil its first webOS tablets, most probably accompanied by some new phones running under the OS.