Today Palm published some information that is sure to leave many Palm Pre owners and webOS developers in dismay. The SDK -- tools necessary for developers to create applications for webOS -- won't be available until the end of the summer. That is not such great news.Palm really couldn't have picked a worse day to share this information. With iPhone hysteria at fever pitch as thousands line up to buy the iPhone 3GS, the last thing Palm needs is for Pre owners to feel left out in the cold.

That's exactly as they should feel.

With no SDK coming until the end of the summer, that means Palm Pre owners hoping to see some more applications populate the Apps Catalog are going to have a long few months ahead of them.

Here's what Palm says about the whole thing:

With the Pre now in customers' hands and reports of webOS hacks in the news, we know that you are more anxious than ever to get access to the SDK and start developing for webOS.

We've been working very hard on the SDK and are eager to open access on a wider scale, but the software and the developer services to support it just aren't ready yet.

Our goal is to make the SDK available to everyone by the end of this summer, and to get there in stages:

• Beginning immediately, we'll accelerate the growth of the early access program, expanding as quickly as resources allow. Over the next few weeks, the program will grow from hundreds to thousands of developers.
• Simultaneously, we'll begin publishing more content outside the early access program, and we'll launching new confidentiality rules that will allow early Mojo developers to communicate more freely with the rest of the world.
• As soon as we can, we'll open the SDK to all legitimate requests.

Until you have the SDK, we encourage you to explore other public webOS resources, including the Rough Cuts edition of Mitch Allen's upcoming book and the sites run by our great community of enthusiasts.

We've also begun getting questions about Palm's stance toward the webOS development "experiments" that have emerged outside the early access program over the last week. We're focused on building a robust and easy-to-use Mojo SDK, and an ecosystem that benefits developers, end users, carriers and Palm alike. As on any popular platform, we recognize that some developers will experiment in ways that cross official boundaries, but we believe that our formal offerings - and community efforts built around those offerings - will provide the best experience for the vast majority of webOS developers and users.

Thanks again for your enthusiasm and support as we roll webOS out to the world!

In comparison, Apple didn't provide an SDK for the iPhone until it had been in the market for about nine months. But when it did, it offered up the whole thing.

Still, the race is on, and Palm knows what is at stake. I am truly surprised it isn't making a more concerted effort to get the SDK into developers' hands.