Styletap: run Palm applications on your iPhone

The project has been in development for more then two years but it has finally seen the light of day: Styletap for the iPhone allows you to run Palm OS applications on the iPhone… if it is jailbroken.

The Canadian company Styletap has announced that they have finally made their Styletap for iPhone application available Apple iPhone, allowing you to run Palm OS applications on the device. The applications have to have been developed for Palm OS Garnet, which saw some good days on non-communicative PDA’s and the first Smartphone's, but not the new WebOS system.

After Palm Inc. decided to progressively abandon their Palm OS system, followed by the dissolution of their own mobile OS, ALP (Access Linux Platform), Styletap decided to create a Palm OS environment emulator covering the diverse range of Smartphone platforms.

Their objective was to allow Palm OS software developers to reach out to a new public seeing as Palm OS devices are becoming increasingly rare, allowing users who are used to Palm OS to once again use their favourite applications on a new environment. The release of such a program also opens up a catalogue of 20 000 applications which would otherwise have been forgotten.


For jailbroken iPhone’s only
After having developed Windows Mobile, Symbian and Blackberry solutions, it is now the iPhone which benefits from this emulator. All applications up to Palm OS 5.2 are capable of running on Styletap for iPhone, with the possibility of copying and pasting from the Palm OS to iPhone applications also being available.

It is also capable of handling a virtual memory card function for large applications, calling on the memory card and using a few virtual keys which emulate the Palm devices physical keys.

Styletap for iPhone is the kind of application which you won’t find on the App Store. You will therefore have to have a jail broken device (iPhone or iPod Touch). The application is offered for 49.95 dollars and can be tested for free for a period of 14 days.