The UIQ Evangelist

How does it feel to be able to run other OS inside your smartphone? Bet it’s going to be a whole new experience aint it? Last week in the Symbian’s Smartphone Show in London, there was an announcement about Styletap, which will bring more than 20,000 existing Palm OS applications into Symbian UIQ 3 and S60 3rd Edition unchanged. Yup, you read that right. 20,000 applications!

Wait a minute, how is that possible? A look into Styletap’s website reveals it’s existing solution available for Windows Mobile. Thousands of users already benefited from it. StyleTap CrossPlatform is compatible with most applications written for Palm OS® devices, and enables them to now run on Symbian smartphones. This gives consumers unprecedented freedom to choose the smartphone that meets their needs without losing their investment in mobile applications and accumulated data.

Personally, I find this exciting as well as spooky If you know what I mean. There are a lot of great applications on Palm OS which are not ported to Symbian yet. For example, Natara Bonsai, a list manager with PC companion.

There’s also some Palm OS app which have been ported excellently to Symbian like Dataviz’s Documents To Go, DDH Software’s HanDBase, and MobiMate’s Worldmate. These are examples of applications which are carefully designed for the new platform.

And there’s also some Palm apps which have been poorly ported to Symbian like Agendus for UIQ. Nowhere near the quality of the Palm version if you asked me.

I am excited to see how Symbian developer community will respond to this. Dont get me wrong, they have proven that they can produce excellent apps but in my opinion, many more work to be done in terms of providing high quality app to fill in the gap.

Styletap’s solution is also interesting because it will attract Palm loyalists to choose Symbian. I know a friend who owns a couple of Palm Tungsten 3 and didn’t choose Symbian because he’s addictive to Palm’s simple UI and powerful applications it has. In particular, applications to manage personal information like Agendus Pro.

I dont want to know the technical details behind it but I would really want to try it myself. However, it wont be available untill early next year.

Tell me, what Palm apps would you like to run in your UIQ 3 smartphones?

Categories: Apps, Coming Soon, Comments, Links, UIQ 3.0
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