Thursday, April 9, 2009

Someone should inform Howard Stern about Classic PalmOS Emulator for the Prē

I don’t really understand on why Palm put up a risk of promoting its most promising new device: the Prē™ by giving a private one-hour demo to the “shock jock” Howard Stern with the smartphone.

Sure, the big mouthed radio jockey superstar from Sirius XM Radio has his own appeal for talking straight forward on whatever he has in mind, and for that Palm got the opposite reaction from what the company was hoping for when they let Howard get personal with the Prē™.

The first tidal wave of excitement started when Palm's head of PR Lynn Fox called the people reps at Howard Stern show, either to make him talk about the Prē™ live on air or just to create a commotion among those who can’t get their hands on the Palm’s latest creation. It worked, the blogosphere was picking up on the news although it came only as a short statement from Howard:

"They're going to show me the Prē™ and then take it away. They're trying to build excitement for this thing. If people don't buy this I don't see how Palm keeps going," said Howard Stern.

It was enough to raised curiosities since there are scarce infos surrounding the Prē™, because there’s only a handful of people (we know of) who has actually held the device themselves. Another thing to worth waited for was because Howard is known as a long time and loyal user of Palm Trēo™, which at least tells us that he love to use mobile technology, a bit of geek like us: Palm-addicts. ;-)

But as we waited to hear good words to come out from Howard about the Prē™ like many reviewers did, Howard did the unexpected by saying the device is “very nice” but he rather choose BlackBerry Bold because he need Lotus Note support on his mobile device. Palm was definitely expecting promotional words of appraisal from him, but instead it turned into a free promotion for RIM, Palm’s very own competitor in mobile business.

That’s why they call Howard Stern as the “shock jock”, Palm just received a “shock” reality check from him.

Not that I want to poke fun at Howard Stern, but a man of his capacity as a superstar in his line of work, I found it hard to believe he still relies on Lotus Note. Wait, not that I’m saying Lotus Note is bad, it is good and reliable but nowadays it is all about ‘cloud computing’. From emails, chatting, browsing, twitting, social networking, etc. are all connected in the ‘cloud’. The best thing about ‘cloud computing’ is that you’ll never have to worry about losing your data when you lost your mobile device, or worry about compatibility issues when you’re switching to a new platform or new device.

You’re free in the ‘cloud’, and like what Palm CEO Ed Colligan has said about the Prē™ during its first introduction at CES 2009: “Lots of smartphone bring you the Internet -- but Prē™ does this without walls.”

But if Howard Stern chooses to keep on using the technologies that still work for him like 3rd app for accessing Lotus Notes on his Trēo™, then someone should inform him about MotionApps’ Classic PalmOS Emulator for the Prē™. An emulator that will allow the Prē™ to run legacy Palm OS apps, and according to MotionApp the maker: "Compared to Treo 700p, your PalmOS apps will run approximately twice as fast on Classic." That is not a surprise because the Prē™ has more power juice inside its slim body than the ol’ Trēo™ smartphones.

The emulator app behaves like any usual apps run on the Prē™, it can be put into the webOS™ card system and stays alive on the background. The user interface itself is like exactly the old PalmOS you’re already too familiar with, at the bottom it even has the older design consists of a D-pad and 4 navigation button plus the two distinctive menu & search buttons on far left-right.

Inside the Classic emulator app there’s also the old HotSync feature, but it’s not going possible for the virtual PalmOS to synchronize with the Palm Desktop. Ed Hardy from BrightHand unearthed a secret about sync capability in Classic: “However, as I mentioned earlier, Palm OS software running in Classic will be able to access the Internet through the Pre. This means that it will be possible to indirectly sync calendar and contacts information. For example, the Pre will be able to automatically keep itself synchronized with Google' calendar and contacts; an app that syncs Google's data with the Palm OS equivalents would accomplish an indirect synchronization.”

Better yet, Howard should know that there will be plenty of apps written for Prē™ which let it sync with Lotus Notes. One for instance is CompanionLink software that Jennifer Chappell has reported at PreCentral.
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