HP's been making a lot of noise about building an ecosystem of webOS device. They've talked about tablets and netbooks and printers, oh, and maybe some phones too. But they haven't really laid any public concrete plans as to what is coming next. We have a sneaking suspicion that the overwhelming response to this question is going to be "OMG new smartphone now!", but we thought we'd ask anyway. So, here goes...

Yesterday was a light day in the App Catalog, again dominated by our friends at Upward Mobility. They may have pumped some 123 test prep apps into the App Catalog to date, but we’re fine with that - afterall, they aren’t piles of you-can-find-it-with-Google wallpapers, quotes, and public domain books. That doesn’t mean we won’t continue to give them a hard time, but it’s all in jest and for the sake of having something to say on a daily basis about the App Catalog.

Anyway, if you filter out the Upward Mobility apps, here’s what was left:

• 1Reader Pro, a $2.99 app from SemicolonApps, lets you access your 1Password keychain and syncs it with DropBox.
• Cat Emergency is a handy guide to dealing with feline medical emergencies ($0.99, by Vimukti Technologies).
• DateCalc, free from the fine people at  Palmdoc.net, lets you plug in a date and a time period and it’ll spit out what day you’re looking for (e.g. what day is 923 days before September 4, 2012?).
• Lowering Your Cholesterol, by AppBookShop and $4.99, gives advice on how to lower your cholesterol. If we had to take a guess, we’d say that the first steps include eating better and exercising more. Just a guess.

There’s more, but not a whole lot (it was Friday, after all), after the break. Hit it, you.

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Since our last edition, Palm's app catalog topped 3,000 (It's quality, not quantity, right?), a clever fan-crafted Pre commercial earned high praises, AT&T dropped the Pre Plus to $99.99 online with activation, and HP decided to kick in a $50 gift card with the purchase of AT&T Palm phones.

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I swear, that's the last time that I download that many flashlight apps...

Financial professionals rejoice:  an emulation HP's famous 12c financial calculator, complete with all of the RPN and Algebraic functionality you'd expect, has been ported to webOS and is currently available in the homebrew gallery.  Based on Elvis Pfützenreuter's Javascript engine, Calc12c supports both the Pre and the Pixi, gives haptic feedback each time an on-screen button is pressed, and offers dead-on styling, making it an excellent approximation to the real thing that's sure to delight the mortgage banker inside of all of you.  

It may be a Javascript emulation of the real thing, but with all of those HP engineers hard at work pumping out apps in response to CTO Phil McKinney's recent challenge, it isn't unreasonable think that these calculators will one day be a staple in the App Catalog from HP itself, making webOS the financial industry's platform of choice. A physical 12c will currently set you back around $70 new, which begs the question: How much would you pay for a proper, coded-by-HP calculator on your webOS device? 

As we head into these last days of July, it’s time to take another look at the App Catalog. Wait, who are we kidding, we look at the App Catalog about a hundred times every day regardless of where in the month we are. Here’s what new:

• World Time, while not a remarkable app in any manner, stands out as the first App Catalog app from our new benevolent overlords at HP. And it gives you the current time for any city on the planet.

Update: Palm's own Chuq Von Rospach notes in the comments:

"World time" was only intended for internal and got published by accident. We've pulled it from public distribution. It's not an "official" HP app intended for external publication, but is part of a "let's all learn how to program webOS" that some parts of HP is doing.

• BlogBooster takes the post-to-your-blog app and puts it into hyperdrive - it supports posting to Wordpress, TypePad, Blogger, and Tumblr.
• Craigs Secretary Pro is made for both Craigslist junkies and those searching for something specific alike; simply enter what you’re looking for an the app will periodically search Craigslist to find matching listings.

So yeah, thems be the highlights. The rest (with another healthy heaping of test prep apps from Upward Mobility) are after the break.

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Palm is pushing out an update to the Facebook Beta Client app, bringing it to version 1.2.32. Included in the update: performance tweaks, bug fixes, and the ability to remember your last selected feed on the next launch. This comes just a few days after the last update (version 1.2.30). And says Palm on Twitter, it’s close to a final release for the general Facebooking public. Sweet, eh?

Source: Palm (Facebook); thanks to everybody that sent this in!