Access releases Palm Garnet emulator for Nokia N-series Internet Tablet
As capable as the Nokia N770/800/810 is for the price one complaint I have heard made is the lack of PIM software that rivals that of PDAs. That complaint may be a thing of the past as Access has announced an emulator that allows the capable tablet to run Palm Garnet applications. The Garnet Virtual Machine is intended to not only allow users to run their precious Palm apps but to allow developers to create apps for the Nokia tablet. ThoughtFix is all over this news with a brief review and a video of the GVM in action.
UPDATE: Graffiti lovers will be ecstatic to find the emulator brings that text entry system onto the Nokias.
Congratulations! My jaw just detached from my head. I will be sending you the bill for restorative surgery…
Holy cow.
Access is really sticking it to Palm with this and they can since they bought Palmsoft and own the Garnet OS and are free to do what they want..
This helps me decide between an 810 or a (i)touch epecially when it looks like the Apple tablet rumors are again bogus and what will be announced at MacWorld is a 13inch mac laptop.
Looks like I’m getting a Nokia!
Hey Mike don’t you think it’s time to forgive Nokia and get a 810?
Non-Palm people will yawn and move on. But this is earthshaking info. It’s not bogus marketing stuff to say that Palm users swim in a virtual sea of really useful Palm programs freely (or cheaply) available. While my 770 and 800 Nokias will probably still keep gathering dust because they don’t have phones built in…the potential of this move…migrating all up to date Palm software to Nokia smartphones is astounding. Thanks for covering this news.
Great news. This brigs me great memories of my tapwave zodiac.
I’ll be trying this soon. It would be sweet if you could use the nokia keyboard on the palm software but I’m not holding my breath waiting for that.
For Gods sake don’t convince Cane to get another Nokia – he didn’t have the wit to use the last one and has whined about it ever since. He’s a Palm fanboi, leave him be… his whinings amongst a dying community is the best place for him.
No he is not exactly a Palm fanboy and lately has been having Apple Iphone urges. I think this is just what he needs to bring him back from the dark side and I think the current state of the developer community and the N810 hardware might be what he has been looking for. Besides I want him to start his blog up again talking about his new found romance with an 810. He is an interesting gadfly and not afraid to say the emperor has no clothes.
come to the light Mike!
I think Nokia has overcome my one problem with their device. My problem was no ereader support. But now I can run all my old palm software. I kinda wish I didn’t sell my old nokia. Good thing I got a nice bonus today.
Two in one reply:
>>>Hey Mike don’t you think it’s time to forgive Nokia and get a 810?
Nokia will NEVER be forgiven. I will spit on that company’s eventual bankruptcy and dissolution. Period.
>>>don’t convince Cane to get another Nokia – he didn’t have the wit to use the last one
You are a dope. I used the bloody EFF out of that piece of crap. Educate yourself, eejit.
http://mikecane.wordpress.com/2007/01/09/nokia-770-the-endgame/
Right. I’ve tried it on the 770:
http://www.palminfocenter.com/comments/9526/#139237
yes but why waste your time trying to get it to work on a 770 that is a POS anyway get an N800 at least and preferably a N810.
The best operating system to use on the Nokia is the New 2008 vers which can be downloaded now.
Previous IT OS’s are problematic- no wonder you had problems. Oh and you can get a full screen image of the Palm emulator. Its counter intuitive but you have to uncheck the full screen option which forces a full image of a Palm PDA on the screen and the usable area is very small, uncheck that and the usable screen is acceptable. It’s a very nice program
Mike believes what he wants to believe. He used the 770, probably the worst example (software-wise) of the IT platform imaginable, and he pushed it too hard as a standard user.
Go ahead, re-read his Endgame post. He’s blaming the OS for a keybounce issue that I’ve seen on MacOS, Windows, AND Linux with the Stowaway and Freedom Mini BT keyboards.
Meanwhile, Nokia has addressed almost all of his software concerns in later IT OS versions, which are (sorta) available for the 770, but it all goes back to the fundamental problem that I’ve tracked down:
Mike is unwilling to really hack his 770. While other users have said “Wow, this software is shit,” and quickly started working on replacement browsers, text editors, connectivity tools, and wrote up guides for setting up swap files, Mike went on ranting. (I should know, I *did* read his blog for a while, in the futile hope that he’d actually post something of value other than a litany of swear words, invectives, and completely tech-free babbling against the 770.)
He also trolled the crap out of the InternetTabletTalk.com forums at the time, griping about issues without providing feedback to the user community, so it was damned near impossible to troubleshoot, or even determine if other users were triggering the same bugs that he was.
I’m not going to say that Mike has some phantom haunted 770 unit, laden with bugs that no one else has ever seen, since I recall that he’s managed to swap units and STILL have the same problems. It’s not him, it’s not his 770, it’s definitely the software, but he wasn’t helping.
I’ll also grant that Nokia COMPLETELY DROPPED THE BALL on the 770. Hardware-wise, it’s an excellent device. It’s a little slow and low on RAM, but it’s got solid IO, great video hardware, and a decent internal architecture.
What kills it is complete and utter garbage for software, tempered by an abundance of half-finished projects from an open source community that will happily scratch its own itches just enough to get some relief. It’s the typical curse of open source. When you let the community write software, they’ll only write what they can whip up quickly, and testing/integration/extensibility be damned. Top that off with Nokia quickly releasing the N800 and locking away any mention of the 770 as the red-headed stepchild of the early UMPC/MID era, and you get an abandoned platform, from which 90% of the development community quickly moved to the N800 side.
There’s a reason that Nokia’s not pitching the N810 as a flat-out upgrade. They can’t afford the PR flak again. The N800 is their powerhouse product now, with more storage options, a swivel-mounted camera, and an FM radio. It’s the take-anywhere, do-anything IT device, and it will happily pair with an external keyboard to overcome the one major shortcoming that it has. The N810 is the easy-to-use variant that’s far less flexible, stuck with a single miniSD slot, and built-in GPS to cut down on bulk. You can pick and choose now, but it took Nokia completely screwing over the early adopters on a level that makes the iPhone price-cut whiners seem downright childish.
The 770 wasn’t ready for anyone but hackers, and Mike isn’t a hacker. He doesn’t want to be, and to be fair, why should he have to be one to use a device sold by Nokia, of all companies? Sure, they don’t really lock down their phones too much, and Symbian phones are lovely for installing additional software, but they’ve NEVER released such a completely poorly-designed, unfinished product before. The UI is too desktop-like for a handheld, the apps are too buggy, and the OS is completely abandoned maybe 18 months after the release.
Sure, Mike’s being spiteful, but typically speaking, the lifecycle of desktops, laptops, and PDAs is on the order of 2-3 years. Cellphones may top out at 2 years. It’s completely preposterous to cut that number down for a device that should operate completely independently of your cellphone, and really shouldn’t have needed much beyond a software overhaul in the first place. I, for one, would *like* an N810, but I’m not a programmer, I lack the free time, and in the end, I simply wouldn’t be able to produce the software that I need as a non-programmer, nor would I care to if I were a programmer in the first place. It’s a shame, as the entire product line just stinks of wasted potential, and it’s why I moved right back into the WinXP handheld camp, battery life issues be damned. I need software solutions, not an open toolkit and a boatload of “potential.”