In Old Man’s War, the John Scalzi novel, a 75-year-old retired ad writer named John Perry gets a new body to go off and fight for the earthlings against all kinds of obnoxious aliens.
So why not apply the same idea to software? Let a sleek Nokia or iPhone run ancient Palm apps; why rely on a tired old company like Palm, which lacks the imagination and guts to recycle the Palm TX as an e-book machine? Not such a bad idea, right? I in fact tried out a Palm emulator for Nokia handhelds and found it to be crap, at least so far. I couldn’t get the HotSync working—I don’t even know if Access’s Garnett VM could run Palm apps at full size. In e-book terms, I was hoping be able to use Mobipocket on my Nokia 770 so I could run DRM-infested books, mostly from the Fairfax County Public Library (you can’t own a DRMed book for real). Maybe the Access people will yet get the Palm emulation act together for the Nokias. Let’s hope so.
StyleTap’s experimental Palm emulator for the iPhone
But what about an idea from StyleTap, even more tantalizing for the techo masses—letting Palmware run on an iPhone or iPod touch, as shown in a proof of concept video discussed by Gizmodo, TechBlog, jkOnTheRun, the MobileGadgeer and Mike Cane (thanks for the pointer, Mike)? Supposedly a Palm program may run more than 400 percent faster than a Palm IIIc. Hmm. Does this mean that Mobi autoscrolling won’t be jerky the way it can be on older Palms? Note that StyleTap has long tamed Palm apps for Pocket PC-type machines. So I’m optimistic.
Exciting but…
Still, as handy as emulation capabilities for the iPhone might be in the here and now, it’s nothing compared to other e-book-related possibilities, once Apple announces its slightly delayed software developer’s kit. The real future would be in the iPhone and other gizmos running slick new .epub-capable readers, ideally without DRM. With .epub you could display the same files on a number of devices, just so they had appropriate readers. The operative phrase here, in this era when many TeleBloggers run e-books off several machines, is “number of.” Oh, how skeptical I am of either iPhone-centric or Kindle-centric visions, especially with Android phones ahead! If nothing else, the world has and as likely to have many more mobile phones than Kindles. Smart publishers will go wherever the market is, rather than limiting themselves to any particular platform.
Unrelated but still on my mind: Where the devil did Scalzi get the name John Perry? Was he thinking of EFF co-founder and legendary DRM foe John Perry Barlow?
“JS:I’m absolutely awful with coming up with names. “John Perry” actually has nothing to do with me; it’s a mash-up of the names of two members of the rock band Journey, being keyboardist Jonathan Cain and former vocalist Steve Perry.”
From: http://www.strangehorizons.com/2005/20050307/scalzi-int-a.shtml
I love Scalzi’s books and they’re getting better and better.
[…] in February, David Rothman wrote of the StyleTap Palm emulator under development for the iPhone, comparing it to the plot of John […]