… And I couldn’t be happier!
Thanks to the magic of virtualization — and the thoughtful folks at Access who’ve released a free Palm (sorry “Garnet”) emulator for Nokia Nseries tablets — my vast library of Treo apps from days gone by can be pressed into service once again.
Downloading the Garnet Virtual Machine couldn’t be easier; I just pointed my tablet’s browser to the Access site and installed it directly from there. The only other necessary step was to dump some .PRC files onto my Nokia’s memory card and voilà — as you can see in the screen grab above, they get automagically loaded into the VM’s launcher.
And this is what the Garnet VM looks like. The Graffiti pad works just as you’d expect, and would make a nice option for stylus input outside the VM, in case anyone from Access was reading this and wanted to license Graffiti to Nokia, hint hint…
HotSyncing to a regular computer is even possible, though just as you’d expect Mac users are left out in the cold on this particular feature. Also, because there is no HotSync app in the VM there is also no place to input your Palm user name, and thus no way to authorize third-party apps and avoid the shareware nags in Astraware Games and the like. There doesn’t seem to be any appreciable performance hit, but there doesn’t seem to be any sound support, either.
Still, the ability to run Palm apps at all instantly makes my N770 tablet twice as useful. Now if I could just find that old copy of Dope Wars…
Andrew Currie 