Sprint this week revealed that Palm is pushing hard to incorporate a battery of enterprise-specific improvements and features for the Pre smartphone and its webOS system software.
Those features are due in the next 60 days, Sprint executives said, but that's about the only detail they provided during briefings designed to highlight Sprint's committement to the enterprise.
Enterprise users can expect only a trickle of third-party Pre applications for now: Palm revealed recently that it's Mojo SDK for webOS won't be generally available until late summer, though it's working to get it into the hands of growing number of software developers accepted in an early adopter program.
But one potentially key application for enterprises is already available: Classic 1.0, from MotionApps, which emulates a Palm Centro handheld running Palm OS 5.4.9. The program lets you run applications written for the older Palm OS unchanged but much faster on the new Palm Pre.
The process seems straightforward:you install a MotionApps PRC file (a Palm file format) on your PC, then copy it to the Pre via a USB cable, and launch the program. Which is fine for individual users but that model certainly isn't going to scale for enterprise deployments.
Sascha Segan has a detailed review of Classic from earlier this month at PC Magazine. Apps that rely on PDB databases are a "pain to install," Segan concluded, and there's no HotSync support, so apps that rely on it are "dead in the water."
And Classic can have a notable impact on performance. "Classic runs in the background on the multitasking Pre, but that really slows things down," Segan writes. 'Having an action game running in Classic caused noticeable pauses in other webOS applications, and Classic and the Pre's MP3 player didn't coexist at all."
Ed Hardy, at Brighthand, reviews the just released Classic 1.1. The updated version has support for sound; and it enlarges parts of the screen so that what had been stylus-clicked buttons can now be activated with a finger tip. The vendor promises greatly improved application stability.
Cox is a senior editor at Network World.
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