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Palm OS Emulator Ported to Sharp Zaurus

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Palm Info Center reports that POSE (the Palm Os Emulator) has been ported to the Sharp Zaurus using the QTopia palmtop environment. See the QPOSE homepage for more information." This could make a Zaurus a much more attractive device to those of us with lots of important info on Palm Os devices, but according to other readers' submissions it does require a Palm ROM image to function.

9 of 91 comments (clear)

  1. And Palm will give you the ROM! by BancBoy · · Score: 4, Informative

    Palm gives out the ROMs for various models via the web for their free "development" Palm emulator. If these ROMs will work for the emulator, you're set.

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    1. Re:And Palm will give you the ROM! by Tha_Zanthrax · · Score: 4, Informative

      That emulator can be found at http://www.palmos.com/dev/tools/emulator/.

      Access to the ROMs requiers a membership of the Palm OS Developer Program. to bad...

      There are tools packed with the emulator to extract ROMs from your PalmOS device.

    2. Re:And Palm will give you the ROM! by Oliver+Wendell+Jones · · Score: 3, Informative

      Access to the ROMs requiers a membership of the Palm OS Developer Program. to bad...

      Gee, when I signed up for the Palm OS Developer Program it was free and only took a very short while.

      It's not a terribly big inconvenience...

      --
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  2. Umm... Its SLOW by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I don't think this will be useful for much of anything until the speed issue is fixed. The emulator takes nearly 3 minutes to go from the Palm logo to the main icon view. I'm not exaggerating.

    Its painful.

    really really painful.

  3. Review of a PalmOS emulator for PocketPC by afflatus_com · · Score: 4, Informative

    Many are working to port PalmOS to PocketPC also.

    Here is a in-depth review a while ago of one of the stronger offerings:
    Review of alpha version of "PocketPalm"

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  4. Sharp could provide a "migration kit" by Karpe · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I have a Palm device. I am searching for a new handheld, but the devices I like the hardware the most do not run PalmOS, which is a need for me. I believe I could legally use my PalmOS ROM in the Zaurus, if I would stop using the Palm. And I would really stop, if I could use my Palm stuff on the Zaurus. If Sharp could provide users such a "migration kit" software for Palm users, that would backup the users Palm ROM and apps to a Zaurus, I guess they could really gain some part of the Palm market. Sharp should really put some resources in these emulation projects. Sell a "Palm compatible" device with much better hardware could be a nice advantage.

  5. Extract ROM from USB Visor by miradu2000 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If you have a Handspring Visor, which IMHO was one of the best PDA's ever, there are instructions for how to extract the ROM using the supplied USB cradle over at VisorCentral.com.

  6. Re:It's getting obselete by Locutus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You don't seem to know much about this. PalmSource is moving to OS5 which is ARM based but they want everyone to keep writing software for the 68k. OS5 will have mappings from the 68k to the ARM native OS5. They say the apps will run more than 2x faster on the ARM than on the current DragonBalls.

    This means there is no reason to expect there being an immediate fork in the application development cycle for PalmOS apps. And all those apps will run on QPose (or atleast most will).

    LoB

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  7. Re:Graffiti? by Melantha_Bacchae · · Score: 3, Informative

    vanyel wrote:

    > I don't see anything that talks about graffiti or other handwriting
    > recognition technologies in either the zaurus or the emulator. I
    > assume it's in the emulator at least, but such assumptions have bit me
    > before...

    Zaurus has its own handwriting recognition (a physical keyboard, a screen keyboard, a pickboard, and a unicode selector for maximum entry overkill ;). And, the emulator has fully functional Graffiti.

    Just don't expect to be able to save anything from the Palm programs, or to be able to load any programs not included in your rom. This emulator is a good idea, and will probably be very useful later on, but you can't do much with it now.

    The Zaurus itself is a very nice PDA that doubles as a tiny little portable Linux computer. I get a lot of use out of it, even though I can't hot sync it with my iMac (no Apple support and I won't insult the little dear by forcing it to communicate with a Windows PC). I access the internet through my Airport wireless network, and can exchange files with my Macs via FTP or an OS X compatible CF card reader.

    "The path of peace is yours to discover for eternity."
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