StyleTap Emulator Brings Palm OS to Jailbroken iPhones

Early last year, Palm bet the farm. They hired a bunch of ex-Apple engineers, killed off all of their old Palm OS devices and announced a new smartphone operating system, webOS, the first truly exciting alternative to the iPhone OS since its unveiling in 2007. They went all in, with their only conciliatory gesture to the existing Palm OS ecosystem a third-party emulator.

Unfortunately, as great as webOS is, that gamble hasn’t paid off for Palm: they are now in dire financial difficulty, and it looks likely that the once revolutionary mobile device maker will soon only be remembered as a footnote in smartphone history.

It’s a shame, and the death of Palm might otherwise have signified the final death of PalmOS, which — before the App Store — was perhaps the most vibrant, crowded and creative platform of mobile app development.

Good news for Palm OS nostalgists, though: the StyleTap emulator has just come out on Cydia, allowing anyone with a jailbroken iPhone or iPod Touch to use it to run Palm OS apps. It’s a bit pricy at $49, but at first blush, StyleTap looks pretty flawless. If the impending death of Palm has you finally considering trading your Pre in for an iPhone, StyleTap will help make that transition a bit easier.

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About the author

John Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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Posted in iPhone, iPhone Apps, News, Software |

Hello
Why not just buy a Palm phone? Palm os on an iPhone still will not connect to iTunes. This sounds silly, but I guess it is good for Apple sales instead of going to dying Palm.
Pat
“finally considering trading your Pre in for an iPhone”?
Ha, I have only had my PALM pre for a few months! It hasn’t even been out an entire year yet!
When you are talking about spending over $200 plus a plan to get one it isn’t exactly a device that you want to change as frequently as you change your socks!
What really sucks about this, is the fact that some of us that aren’t fond of the iPhone (I hate the touch screen for typing, love it for surfing, but prefer actual keys for emails etc.)
If PALM does go under, I get screwed. Obviously my phone will still work, but the one feature that the sales person sold me on, the fact that the software has the ability to be updated regularly won’t happen! No new applications, my phone will not be as useful as it should have been.
Now I am being told that the “hero” phone is better because you can update and change the firmware.
In the end I will probably have to get the iPhone, but that sucks because now I have to spend even more money if I want more than 8G’s.
It is ridiculous!
MacRat
You forgot to write “beleaguered Palm”