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With the Pre smartphone in line for release this summer, Palm is giving away more details the upcoming webOS platform that will power the device – and all future Palm models for that matter. Speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo yesterday, Palm’s Michael Abbott announced that the company is ready to let a “broad group of developers” start playing with its Mojo SDK and showed off how they can tap into the phone’s core functionality such as linked contacts, layered calendars, multitasking and push notifications.

Developers can currently pre-register to download the SDK for no charge at developer.palm.com, though Palm won’t be releasing the software toolset to the general public just yet. Instead, the company will screen the application ideas submitted on its website, letting in a few testers at first and scaling up over time as the tools mature with feedback and requests from the development community. They obviously hope to attract loads of developers to create a broad selection of applications like that available to iPhone users.

The company also announced webOS will include an emulator for running legacy Palm OS apps, instantly giving Pre users a library of more than 20,000 applications to choose from. No pricing or availability for the smartphone information was revealed, but they did release another demo video of the Pre in action.