Palm Pre gets ready-made fix for dearth of apps: old Palm software

Palm’s new Pre smartphone has been slammed by critics for its dearth of apps, the mobile applications that have made the iPhone so popular.
While Apple has more than 59,000 apps for the iPhone, there are only a few dozen available on the Palm Pre’s store. But San Mateo, Calif.-based MobiHand and MotionApps say they have a solution: emulated versions of older Palm software.
The two companies today have opened the MobiHand Classic App Store. The web site is dedicated to offering a large selection of Palm OS apps that will run on the Palm Pre using the MotionApps Classic Palm OS emulator. That is, MotionApps has built software that allows older apps based on the Palm OS to run on the new operating system running on the Palm Pre, webOS. You have to pay $29.99 for the Classic emulator, which can run the apps from the store on your Pre.
Now there are a bunch of apps related to games, entertainment, personal productivity and other tings on the site. The emulator can run the older apps on the Pre faster than they originally ran, since the Pre is more powerful. The titles include apps such as Aces Texas Hold’em, Bejeweled, BlackJack Deluxe, Agendus, and SplashID.
Steve Howard, president and chief executive of MobiHand, said there is a large catalog of 6,000 Palm apps, many of which can be adapted to run on the Pre. There will be new apps coming out, but it may take a while before the materialize.
In the meantime, the emulated apps may satisfy early purchasers of the Pre. MobileApps will have a community forum for classic Palm fans. Those fans can volunteer to approve apps as well in a kind of Wiki process. The older Palm apps have to be certified. So far, about 150 older Palm apps are available in the store, Howard said. Some apps are free, while manyh are paid.
San Francisco-based MotionApps secured a license from Palm for the Palm OS. Without that, it would have been extremely difficult to build an emulator.
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