Information Madness

Palm Pre is just few hours away and everyone is excited about the phone. Since the Pre's own native app store is so thin and might take few months to get loads of Palm Pre Native applications, Palm Pre lovers should have some ways to import the good old Palm OS applications into Palm Pre.

Palm Pre has a new application called MotionApps Classic, which lets Palm's new handset run many of the 30,000 programs written for the old PalmOS platform. Classic is definitely a work in progress, but it's a hugely important app for the Pre platform.

You can download and install Classic from the Palm App Catalog. Once it's installed, it puts an application icon into your Launcher like any other Palm Pre app. Tap on the Classic icon, and you get a real shocker: a 320-by-320, 2.4–inch-diagonal Palm OS display with a virtual cursor pad and virtual action buttons below it.

Classic emulates a Palm Centro running Palm OS 5.4.9, but, of course, it's much faster.To load in new apps, plug your Pre into a Mac or PC, choose USB disk mode, and drop the apps' PRC files into a ClassicApps folder that Classic creates on the Pre's flash drive. For the Palm OS apps that rely on PDB database files,  you have to use a freeware third-party Palm OS app, FileZ, to move the PDBs from the virtual memory card that Classic uses into the virtual Centro's virtual main memory.

To enter text, you use the Pre's keyboard. You can also kick the keyboard into a mode where keys map to control-key functions—like T, D, K, and B working the cursor pad—which is good for games. Classic minimized itself and opened the Pre's native Web browser.

The upcoming version 1.1 of Classiclet you pinch-zoom, just as you can in the Pre's Web browser, so you can click on small interface elements. You can find out more about Palm Pre MotionApps Classic

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