TamsPalm – the Palm OS / web OS Blog

MotionApps Classic emulator is extremely important for Pre heads – after all, it is one of the few ways for them to get their hands onto decent games. People wanting to use it for business unfortunately found themselves limited due to the lack of HotSync.

Version 2 of the product introduced this missing feature. MotionApps now states the following:

Classic v2.0 (re)trial now available for all our users, free of charge
Since v2.0 has been released, many of you contacted us to ask for retrial period and we’ve seen same interest in the PreCentral forums, so the logical step for us was to find a way to enable another fully functional trial period for all the users that already tried Classic before, and thus used trial period.

All of you can now try Classic v2.0 release to evaluate it once again or for the first time, and to see how (well) it compares to previous version. Your (re)trial period is good for the next 10 days.

Your can download Classic from App Catalog on your Pre and find helpful info on our website within Tech Spec page, overview page and detailed HotSync tutorial.

So, hit the App Catalog and let us know how it goes…

Palm’s Pre has hit German roads yesterday, and has been selling extremely well.

Our German division visited one of the launch parties and has a bunch of images below:
http://tamspalm-de.tamoggemon.com/live/2009/pre-launch-party/

Don’t ask me why, but the Palm Pre is limited to 64MB worth of apps. Install any more, and you get an out of memory error – even if you still have gigabytes of free memory.

Rod Whitby analyzed the OS and found the following:

…

If you run “du -s /var/usr/palm/applications/*”, and add up all the numbers in the first column, then as soon as you hit the 62367 1K blocks limit of the addition of the sizes reported by that “du” command and the size of the app you with to install, you will get the dreaded “Sorry, Not Enough Memory” error from the Palm App Catalog application (and any other installer, like fileCoaster or PreLoad, which uses the palm appInstaller API). It doesn’t matter whether you have 192MB free in your /var partition, it will max out at just under 64MB of application usage.

Update #2: I have now created a Linux Application called “Fair Dinkum App Limit” (org.webosinternals.fairdinkum), which removes both the “hang” and the arbitrary application limit. You can find it in Preware. Just install it (no need to even run anything – if it is installed, it’s working), and you’re ready to install more applications than you can poke a stick at …

Fair Dinkum App Limit works by simply putting a couple of wrapper scripts in /usr/local/bin, which returns a size of zero when du is called, and returns the output of “ipkg -o /var list_installed” when “ipkg -o /var list” is called. In the future, the wrappers will be made much more sophisticated than they are right now to prevent operation outside of the specific cases where they need to fool LunaSysMgr, and to also include a safety buffer so that users do not fill the /var partition. This is a tactical response to a problem that people using homebrew applications are experiencing. Hopefully, Palm will provide the long term solution for limits on application installation in a release in the near future.

…

Further information can be had on his blog, which sits at the URL below:
http://www.rwhitby.net/blog/webos-internals/palm-pre-app-install-limits.html

So far, Palm’s Pre is being offered with CDMA transmitters only. Fortunately, GSM heads are in luck – the box is well on its way to various European carriers.

SlashGear got their hands onto the box which is scheduled and left with mixed impressions. While they liked the device, they noted that the box drops with version 1.1.3 of webOS and furthermore has a pretty bad camera:

…

There’s plenty to like about the Palm Pre. It’s a compact, attractive handset that doesn’t allow its relatively small display to get in the way of intuitive gestures and a visually-rich UI. Nonetheless, there are also a fair few shortcomings, and we’d particularly encourage would-be owners to try out the keyboard to see how well it suits their finger size; hardware ‘boards don’t necessarily trump their on-screen counterparts. The limited storage is another frustration, though the news that Adobe plan a webOS Flash 10.1 beta later in 2009 does at least promise improved streaming multimedia at some point in the future.

…

Further information can be had at the URL above…