Sprint says webOS 1.3.5 is hitting the Pre today
Well, lookie here: it's not up on Palm's support site yet, but Sprint is showing a release date of December 28 — that's today, by the way — for webOS 1.3.5 on the Pre. This is a pretty nifty little upgrade, you might recall …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Pre arrived in 2009 as the phone developers hoped would finally challenge Apple — early developers judged webOS to live up to its hype that April — but its road to market was rocky, with Sprint's own CEO saying the device still wasn't ready two months before launch. Through it all, the Pre remained a confirmed Sprint exclusive, making the carrier the sole distribution point for both the handset and its software.
That positioning is what makes today's news matter: Sprint is showing a December 28 release date for webOS 1.3.5 on the Pre even though the update has not yet appeared on Palm's own support site, meaning the carrier is once again out front on the platform's lifecycle. It lands alongside Palm's fall push around free apps and open development on webOS.
First-order effects
- Sprint Pre owners gain access to webOS 1.3.5 today, with the carrier — not Palm's support site — serving as the source of truth for availability.
- Palm gets another over-the-air delivery cycle on its only carrier partner, keeping its single-device platform current without a retail event.
Second-order effects
- For developers who backed webOS early, a steady update cadence from Palm and Sprint is evidence the platform is being maintained between hardware releases — relevant to whether they keep investing in the app catalog.
- Apple's iPhone remains the competitive benchmark here: each shipped webOS revision narrows or widens the gap that made the Pre the first credible challenger, so Apple faces pressure to keep matching feature deliveries rather than resting on annual hardware refreshes.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, carrier-delivered OS updates become a standing channel through which a single-carrier exclusive like the Pre stays competitive — shifting platform competition from launch-day specs to post-launch software velocity.
- Hardware already in users' hands becomes the upgrade path: rumors that the Pre could gain video recording purely through a software update point toward value accruing to firmware teams rather than new device cycles.
The trend: Smartphone platforms are increasingly competing on over-the-air OS update cadence rather than hardware launches, with carrier partnerships determining when those updates reach owners.