11.14.07
Palm on your Nokia Tablet
Access, the owner of the Palm OS has released a potentially powerful weapon for the Nokia Tablet, but is far too rough at this point for me to really recommend for anything other than experimentation.
When I read the news this morning I was very excited and actually downloaded the .deb while waiting for the train. I did not really read much on the Access site initially and have found since that even though there are over 30,000 Palm Garnet Applications in the world, only about 12 are promoted as working and in my search to get things running, I’ve found more that don’t work that do … for now.
The Garnet application lets you see what’s installed, launch the virtual machine, define settings - fullscreen or not which puts the device in portrait mode, set memory options etc. When you launch the Virtual Palm, you’ll see a windowed Palm running the application you’ve selected.
Yes bejeweled works which is a nice memory for me, though it feels hokey to play this game in a restricted space as you see above. I’d really like to see the VM support the full size of the screen even though the resolution would need to be adjusted to do this. Perhaps with some pixel doubling (or you invent the method) we’ll see a way to get a larger virtual Palm on the tablet. Ideally I’d love to see a transparent mode as we have with Parallels and VM Fusion on the Mac. If I could launch a Palm app from within my applications list it would really be slick.
I’ve tried SnapperMail, SplashID, TideTool, Agendus, eReader and Google Maps. SplashID works fine. SnapperMail does not support Gmail IMAP and is not letting me connect to my Fastmail IMAP account either… TideTool, Agendus and eReader won’t install. Google Maps works, but does not support the GPS and I did not see a way to tell the app that I had one - checking the Google site I see this is how the app seems to work for Palm, not just the virtualized version…
Sync reportedly works but only with a PC over IP. I have a feeling that Missing Sync would be able to connect with the Virtual Palm though I’ve yet to test. I can’t see syncing my PIM data for the moment and would really only use this as an easier way to install things that removing the memory card which is what I’m doing now. (there’s a bug in the Chinook beta that might corrupt my OS with a file transfer over USB)
At the moment my Virtual Palm will not launch. I think it’s in need of a reinstall, but since I can’t even get the email working I’m going to pass until the next update. While I really like this idea there’s a lot of work to be done here to make it useful and not just an exercise in “because we can.” I know this probably reads a bit on the harsh side, but for now this is a work in progress…hopefully we’ll see some improvements and if Palm ever actually releases a linux based distro, perhaps even some interesting native application opportunities.
Technorati Tags:
N-Series, N800, N810, Nokia, Virtualization, Palm
