UK Palm Pre to get paid apps in March

To celebrate (pictured) the excruciating lateness of the Palm Pre to the UK late last year, Palm has set a date for paid-for applications to be available on the device in Europe: this March.

Yeah, that's only, what, a billion years later than it should be? It might not seem like a big deal, but paid apps are usually the best apps, and goodness knows the Pre needs some extra selling points to help it battle the now multi-networked UK iPhone and Android devices.

So it's getting some extra selling points. Six hundred of them, in fact. From March, Palm will intravenously inject over half a thousand paid apps into your Pre's UK app store -- something the US has had for months.

For developers, paid apps offer an obvious incentive for writing Pre applications: moolah. On the iPhone, games developer Tepulous was reported recently to be snagging a cool million dollars for downloads of its software. And not once, but every month. The situation is very different on other platforms, where very little money is being made.

But in the UK there's currently no chance at all of getting paid for that effort, so developers don't have a Brian Blessed-sized reason to give a damn. Roll on March, we say.