Palm has announced something that many Palm OS die-hards have been waiting to hear: the Pre smartphone will have the ability to run Palm OS legacy applications when it launches sometime in the first half of 2009.
PreCentral.net broke this story on April 1st, meaning it took a bit more convincing than normal that this was, in fact, true.
The "Classic" emulator will be provided by MotionApps. As you can see on the graphic, they cleverly use the bottom third of the screen to represent the standard Palm's hardware buttons, meaning most functions should be usable on regular apps. Hacks and system-level utilities, such as things that change how the keyboard functions, alter Palm OS preferences, or access specific bits of hardware on the Treo (e.g., the camera) likely will not work at all.
One interesting thing is the performance gain that MotionApps' Classic will offer to legacy Palm OS apps:
Compared to Treo 700p your PalmOS apps will run approximately twice as fast on Classic.
Wow! That speaks volumes about how poweful the Pre's new TI OMAP 3440 CPU will be if it can run apps in emulation mode twice as fast as the 700p's 312 MHz Intel XScale PXA270 processor.
While using crusty (in most cases) Palm OS apps isn't the main reason so many are excited about the Palm Pre, it is certainly comforting knowing that those of us who still rely on a Palm OS device as our regular smartphone, but want to move to the Pre when it launches, won't have to lose a lot of functionality while we wait on developers to port over their apps or code up replacements that are better integrated with the Pre's webOS platform.
Backward compatibility is truly the best of both worlds, the old and the new.
Update: Here's a short video of a Palm rep demoing the Classic emulator for Phonescoop:
YAY! HandyShopper users over the world will be so happy! :)
Now if they would just make a GSM version. No way I'm switching carriers just for a new shiny, though. Never have, never will.