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
My Personal Blog » Palm on your Nokia Tablet said,
November 14, 2007 at 1:24 am
[…] Check it out! While looking through the blogosphere we stumbled on an interesting post today.Here’s a quick excerpt [IMG N810 with Palm Garnet] 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 w […]
harry said,
November 25, 2007 at 11:30 pm
Garnet VM installs perfactly on my N800 but soemhow I can not access any data (like MP3 songs, videos, pictures etc) at all which are otherwise on my SD cards. Pocket tunes gives two directories Palm and Internal memory but can not find anything to play! I am just going crazy, despite having a lod of media, why nothing plays in any aplm application I have installed? I have tried different combinations of devices, rerinstalled. Am I missing something? What is the use of applications like Pocket Tunes etc. if it cannot see media on my internal and external memory cards? I have 2 GB and 8GB.
Jonathan Greene said,
November 25, 2007 at 11:40 pm
I hear you man … it’s very early for this one. Seems more like proof of concept than something I’d want to run regularly.
Angel said,
February 10, 2008 at 1:25 am
Originally this was the reason I started considering buying a Nokia Tablet. Having all my Palm PIM applications AND Internet access along with greater multimedia capabilities was a dream come true. Unfortunately I have to say that this Palm emulator is a serious disappointment, most applications have in many cases only the basic functionality and no sound support. I thought a Nokia tablet + Palm applications was a winning combination but the sad truth this is still far from happening. I just hope the VM Garnet goes through some enhancements to go beyond the Beta stage. Then we might have the excellent combination some of us assumed would come out of this.