hyalineskies

Note: Read StyleTap’s response to this review.

A tremendous amount of Buzz has been generated over a little program known as StyleTap, the equivalent of a Palm OS Simulator for the Pocket PC. No one really knows what StyleTap does on a low level; that is, if it’s a simulator like PalmSource’s own Garnet Simulator, or if it is something more along the lines of (and adapted from) the old-school Copilot. Whatever it is (and trust me, PalmInfocenter’s got a comment barroom brawl going on,) StyleTap’s main functionality still holds true: you can run any application that runs on Garnet’s PACE (that is, for non-developers, runs as a classic 68K program) on the emulator. The beta of StyleTap, available at StyleTap’s homepage, is remarkably stable with only a few call issues needing to be worked out - primarily, the resolution scaling being a pain, and, secondarily, the utter lack of Palm OS-specific identifiers like the Hotsync username - a piece of data that is used to generate registration keys for a ton of third-party Palm applications. Yeah. It’s cool. It’s an emulator. It’s for the rival device. It’s equivalent to running Mac OS X on an x86 box under Windows, like the much-hyped, yet dismal, PearPC.

Needless to say, I’m a Palm OS developer first, and a Pocket PC user that’s switched to the “dark side” after one too many issues with PalmSource. Obviously, the idea was novel enough. I installed StyleTap on my X3i. The first issue that I noticed was that my X3i’s 240×320 screen scaling made everything distorted, so I was reduced to scaling down to 160×160. This means that I’ve got a window smaller than the m100’s screen to look at - about 4 square inches. I decided to save my eyes physically and allow them to suffer aesthetically by switching scaling back to the nasty mess that it was. I then compiled my currently-in-development baby, the Torpedo 3 web development IDE for Palm OS, set to ARM-native mode to see if it would work, and then loaded it onto the Axim. Here’s a picture of Torpedo 3 running as total distorted crap on StyleTap:

(68K Compiled)

For comparison, here’s Torpedo 3 running on the Garnet Simulator:

(ARM Compiled)

When I ran the ARM-compiled code, StyleTap failed miserably. It crashed on load, and didn’t even display the splash screen. I confirmed the fact that StyleTap doesn’t work at all for new ARM-architecture code, and only like an older 68K device, which renders a lot of games and other Palm-optimised software utterly useless. StyleTap failed once. I opened my development environment and recompiled Torpedo 3 for 68K devices, without the ARM-native code. (Ironically enough, the 68k file’s 200KB smaller - my IDE is nearly half a megabyte at the current stage of development.) That’s all it took, I guess - it instantly loaded the program.

What makes it even more interesting is the fact that StyleTap, unlike other OS emulators, is brutally fast- it was faster at loading and rendering the Torpedo IDE than Palm OS’s Garnet Simulator on my desktop. The first load of the IDE unpacks a lot of system libraries and creates a huge amount of databases. It took 28 seconds to load the first time on my 1.2 GHz Pentium M. StyleTap does all of the heavy database operations in little over 4 and a half seconds. I have yet to test my program on an actual Palm OS handheld, so I unfortunately can’t compare StyleTap’s speed to an actual device.

I handed StyleTap a couple of tricky OS calls to see if it would freak out. It handled them all properly. One major bug I did notice, however, is that if the Pocket PC turns off automatically, it will not refresh the Palm app on wake.

I also decided to look into the HotSync Username bug. Since StyleTap has no “HotSync” application that allows you to easily find out your device’s HotSync username, I had to write a little utility that made some system calls to find out the HotSync Username, Palm OS version, Color Depth currently set and Number of Memory Cards available to the device. If you want it, here’s the 68K version and here’s the ARM version. When running on the Garnet simulator, the Diagnostics program reports this:

(ARM Compiled)

I have a line set in the program that if the emulator returns no HotSync username string to write “none present” as opposed to showing a blank line. And, of course, here’s what StyleTap returns:

(68K Compiled)

Where it gets ZJENCHK68Y from I don’t know. I searched all over Windows CE for that code (System Information, Device ID, about, etc.) and didn’t find anything. I even pulled my X3i’s battery to see if the Serial Number matched up to no avail. I can only assume that this is some unique identifier that StyleTap came up with, but I’m not sure.

Okay, so that’s a lot of information, but that’s just the beginning. Now that you’ve seen StyleTap, I guess you can hear me out on what a bunch of naysayers at PalmInfocenter have been chanting since the 28th: death of Palm. Nail in coffin. I’d like to actually back up PalmSource at this point, and yell, for the sake of the Palm OS, the Monty Python quote: “I’m not dead yet!”

To say that something as unrefined as StyleTap is going to take over the Palm OS is really like saying PearPC is going to overtake the Mac. Sure, the devices are cheaper, and sure, you can run your favorite OS-exclusive programs, but StyleTap is far from a solution to those problems. It may do in a quick fix, but in the case of Torpedo for example, it is going to die if you run ARM-native code. Yes, I understand it’s a beta, but that’s something HUGE. Oh, yeah, and I can’t confirm this: supposedly StyleTap doesn’t support Bluetooth.

To make things worse, StyleTap-emulated programs look like utter crap when scaled on the QVGA screen so common to the Pocket PC. To take advantage of Palm’s native 320×320 or 320×480, you’ll need the X50v or another humongous brick. One of the main complaints at PIC nowadays is that Palm devices have gotten too large; however, they dare to say that the X50 is somehow going to kill Palm devices half its size. They need to figure out what to complain about; their endless hammering anything and everything is what’s going to kill PalmSource, not this glorified 68K emulator.

The main argument that StyleTap has running for it right now is the fact that ignorant salespeople (and equally ignorant consumers) are going to take this as a way to run their Palm programs on a “faster”, cheaper WinCE device, thereby killing the Palm OS market softly. All it takes for a common user is for a CompUSA representative to tell them that they can run their old Visor Deluxe’s Palm OS applications on that handy dandy new iPaq, and they’re sold. (Unfortunately, they think that “Windows Mobile” means it’s more integrated with Windows, as well, while that’s not been the case. In fact, all I’ve seen out of Windows Mobile is all of the slowness associated with Windows with none of the integration I’d expect with Microsoft Office. Palm (and Chapura’s PocketMirror, as well as DataViz’s Docs to Go) is way more integrated with Office than Pocket Word and Excel could ever be.) Once these kiddies buy a Windows Mobile device, load Docs to Go and their Palm OS games, and then attempt to run them under StyleTap, they’ll be pissed when StyleTap just blows up in their faces, exits back to the Windows Programs folder, and leaves them hungry for ARM. Maybe, just maybe, the user will be patient (and light-hearted) enough to download WinCE-exclusive applications and say “hey, this beats my Palm application”, but then they’ll be faced with the task of porting all their old data to the new OS. In other words: too much of a hassle for anyone but the übernerds of the PDA world. I’m also quite sure that none of the übernerds are going to jump ship from PalmSource because they were able to run an old 68K application in a buggy StyleTap environment that’s reminiscent of my old m130 test device. They’d have jumped ship for other reasons, such as gaming.

In that regard, I don’t think StyleTap’s anywhere close to a Palm OS-killer. If anything, it’s a geek’s novelty. It shows no real application in a corporate environment to me except to run OLD - and I mean OLD (since OS 5 (and that wonderful ARM-native architecture) was released with the Tungsten T back in October 2002) proprietary applications that may have been custom developed for them. Once again, it’s probably not worth shelling out for an X50v or other VGA Pocket PC and a $30 Styletap Beta (yes, these pretentious engineers are charging for a beta) when the Palm OS device in your pocket has all of your data safe and secure as it is.

So, let me close with this verdict (and my apologies for my crappy writing style today; I’ve had too much caffeine): PalmInfocenter’s regular posters has declined to a bunch of people that attack Palm’s every move. They want a device with 802.11/BT/Hard Drive/nice screen from PalmOne, and then when they’re given one, they complain that it’s not the size of the Palm Vx. PalmSource and PalmOne, listen to the great Charles Babbage for inspiration, not this lowly blogger, and take heed at what he had to say about the English government when his funding was cut for the revolutionary Difference Engine:

“Propose to an Englishman any principle, or any instrument, however admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English mind is directed to find a difficulty, a defect, or an impossibility in it. If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple.”

Screw PalmInfocenter. My days of posting there are done. (PalmSource and PalmOne, I’m buying a Treo 650 within the next three weeks.)