Eyes-On with Palm Pre's Palm OS Emulator

At the CTIA Wireless trade show on Thursday, we got demos of the new Palm OS emulator, along with the Pandora, Nascar, Sprint TV, and FlightStats apps. All of them worked quite smoothly. The Palm OS emulator even runs in the background—you can pop up a Palm OS app, reduce the whole emulator to a card, shunt it aside and do something else.

Palm OS device owners will be able to drag and drop their old PRC program files onto the Pre using a USB cable. If an app requires a HotSync ID, you can enter an arbitrary one using a utility that comes with the emulator. You can't HotSync data from your PC, though.

The emulator can access the Internet and comes with the standard Palm OS PIM apps, though the emulator's contacts and calendar aren't connected to the Pre's.