June 24th, 2009
Do Palm Pre owners have to look to the past to get apps?
Come on now people, let the Palm OS apps go and move on to the future of mobile technology. I received an email notifying me that MobiHand and MotionApps announced the grand opening of the MobiHand Classic App Store that is dedicated to offering those ancient Palm OS apps to run in the MotionApps Classic Palm OS emulator. It seems a bit sad that there are still so few apps for the WebOS and Palm Pre while the Classic Palm OS emulator has to be promoted as the place to get applications.
I installed the trial of Classic back when I had my Palm Pre, but did not find it valuable enough to pay the $30 for it at the time. I only really used it for two applications, MyBible from Laridian and Tide Tool. The problem was that more than 1/3rd of the display was taken up by the virtual Grafitti area and there was no way to minimize this like I used to on my Palm Tungsten T3. If I could have minimized this and used the full display for reading and viewing then I probably would have purchased Classic on the Pre.
While it is true that you can run hundreds of the old Palm OS applications, you should be able to do most of what you need in modern applications that have better user interfaces and are optimized for today’s high end hardware.
Am I being too harsh on the Palm OS apps or do you agree with me that it is time to cut loose and live in the present?
Matthew Miller is an avid mobile device enthusiast who works during the day as a professional naval architect in Seattle. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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