It's interesting that they've used VirtualBox to run the emulator.

Really clever.

"The Palm Emulator is built on VirtualBox, virtual machine software that you can download free from Sun Microsystems." Shouldn't that be Oracle?

From wikipedia:

"On April 20, 2009, Sun and Oracle Corporation announced that they entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun for $7.4 billion. The deal is still pending, with no date yet given for its completion."

Also, the Sun name probably won't go away for quite some time.

Why would they want to get rid of a brand name like Sun?

I know a lot of people who love Sun. I can't name five that would tolerate Oracle if they had an alternative.

is it? the android sdk emulator is based on qemu.

The SDK is pretty cool ... but I get the feeling they're going to have to release something with more weight in the future lest we never see apps like Google Voice, augmented whatchahoosit, games, etc.

Does anyone know if they're planning on releasing a lower level SDK?

Sure am glad I spent 25 minutes applying last week. :-/

I spent 25 minutes applying twice before getting approved... last week.

While I applaud the move it seems like a bad idea to throw open your SDK to thousands of developers months before they can actually submit applications.

It's likely thousands of applications will be submitted in a short time frame leading either to huge waits before apps are released (and fixes for those apps are released), or "bad press" apps such as Baby Shaker sneaking through.

I thought Palm specifically said they would not filter out apps based on content. [source needed]

yeah, we're talking about Palm here, not Apple.