Palm OS Garnet holdouts have another option for running classic Palm OS apps on fully equipped modern hardware that is shipping today.

Nokia's new N900 Maemo 5 powered smartphone is now capable of running Access' Garnet VM emulator. While it is still officially unsupported at this time, an install is possible with a little bit of command line tinkering.

Access Garnet VM has traditionally been aimed at Nokia's maemo powered Internet tablets. However the latest update will work on N900 without many complaints, the trick is simply getting it to install.

A new class action lawsuit has been filed against Palm Inc. and Sprint in the U.S. District court over issues with the webOS backup system. The suit alleges that Palm Pre customers have unnecessarily suffered catastrophic data loss including their contacts, calendars and other personal information as a result of failed backups.

In this specific case a Palm Pre customer, Jason Standiford, exchanged his phone under warranty at a local Sprint store. Mr. Standiford had already gone through three previous warranty exchanges for his Pre due to various hardware issues. To summarize, on his fourth exchange a Sprint store clerk "permanently deleted" his only backup available and the Palm profile restoration subsequently failed to recover a majority of Standiford's data. After many trials, it took three weeks for a Palm technician to partially restore some of his missing records.

I had just ended a telephone call on my Palm Treo 755p. I had been on a Bluetooth earpiece because I was driving. I looked at the Treo and the standard buttons that appear during a call were still visible (hang up, headset, etc.). The call was over. The call had been over for two to three minutes and still the Treo acted as though it were still going on. Obviously, it had crashed. I handed the phone to my passenger and explained how to remove the battery, then reinsert it. When the battery was reinserted I got the dreaded "English or Spanish" screen, obviously indicating that a hard reset had taken place.

Let's forget about the fact that a handset shouldn't do stupid tricks like this, because all handsets incessantly do stupid tricks like this, and we users say, "Thank you very much, please kick me again, because I love my shiny object anyway." My son has a Blackberry which he has reported resetting on occasion. I know iPhones can do it. The manufacturers tell us "well, that's the price of the technology." I don't know when the 'price of technology' became tolerating mediocrity or at least institutionalizing it, but what became glaringly obvious to me was that every one of these manufacturers who do not provide for external storage are sending us the message: "Don't run these things in mission critical environments because we cannot guaranty they will always function."

And so let it be said at last: this is totally unacceptable.

San Rafael based Artifex software has brought a suit against Palm Inc. in the U.S. District Court for northern California. The company claims Palm Inc. infringed on its copyright for its PDF rendering engine which is used in webOS.

Artifex is the developer and copyright owner of muPDF, a high-performance PDF rendering engine targeted at mobile devices. The company alleges that Palm improperly integrated muPDF in the Palm Pre's "PDF viewer" application without Artifex's authorization and in violation of the GPL.

Kris is back with his semi annual report on the state of Palm's retail presence in the US. In his latest report, Kris ventures out to the local Best Buy and a Sprint Store to checkout Palm's latest offerings and current product presence in the brick and mortar space.

Palm-Branded Accessories Now Available at Best Buy
While accessories don't make or break a company's fortunes, first-party accessories are a nice way to pad the corporate coffers while bolstering a firm's branding and visible retail presence.

Approximately five months after the retail launch of the Pre, retail giant Best Buy have finally begun stocking a full line of Palm-branded Pre and Pixi accessories. Interestingly, Best Buy's prices for the Touchstone cradle and the Pre Leather Side Case are $5 below Palm's MSRP and web store pricing. The Palm AC and vehicle chargers remain at the standard $29.99 price points.

Palm and Sprint have begun to push out a new webOS update. At this time it seems the update is solely directed at the Palm Pixi as Pre owners are not being notified of a new release. The software update itself is a smaller 3MB file that will bring the Pixi up to webOS 1.3.2.

Palm has yet to post the usual change log and release notes, however some initial reports seem to indicate that it improves overall performance.

Update: The change log has been posted and it is spartan. Only two small changes are disclosed: a wired headset button update and unmentioned security fix.

MetaView's Palm OS Twitter app, 2TwitMe, has just seen a major update. The best Twitter client for Palm OS keeps getting better with the refinement of its timeline display and many other usability enhancements. Some of the latest changes include a larger timeline display, a thumb enhanced UI, avatars in the list, saved tweet position, searching, better text input and a conversation display mode. For a detailed look you can checkout Tim's recent review of the last version.

2TwitMe v1.3 is available now. It is compatible with Palm OS Garnet 5.0 and above (Palm TX, Treo and Centro's) and also works on Classic. It regularly costs $6.95 and comes with a free trial period. It is currently on sale in the PalmInfocenter Store for $3.95 until Dec 15th.

Access has released another update to its Palm OS Garnet VM for Nokia Internet Tablets running Maemo. The Garnet VM Beta 5 (v1.04b) is said to offer various undisclosed stability improvements.

The Garnet VM is a virtual machine that essentially acts as an emulator with the ability to run native Palm OS applications on the Nokia N770, N800 and N810 devices, but not the new Nokia N900 phone. It supports over 30,000 native software applications written for the Palm OS, including some of the most popular mobile applications on the market, such as Google Maps, Bejeweled, SnapperMail and Sudoku.

The PalmInfocenter Store is getting into the Cyber Monday spirit with a 24 hour MobileHeist app extravaganza. Surf on over to our MobileHeist sales page and find 50% discounts on many best selling classic Palm OS and Windows Mobile titles. These special prices are only good today, so act fast.

WebOS users can also join the fun and pickup a classic game or utility to run with MotionApp's Classic emulator.

As is the custom, Palm.com is holding a sale and has a number of special offers this holiday weekend at its online store. The main promotion this year is $30 off of orders totaling $99 or more. This promo is valid today through December 1st. In addition, the Palm store is also offering free standard shipping in the U.S. on all order of $69 or more.

Palm seeking bargain hunters can also find a wide array of discounts at Amazon.com, including the recent deep discounts on the Palm Pre (at $79) and Palm Pixi (for $25 requires a new plan activation).

Software Sale
The PalmInfocenter Store also continues its app sale throughout the end of the month. Users can find classic Palm OS and Windows Mobile apps on sale and take 20% off your entire order with the coupon code: PALMOS-CLASSIC

Else Mobile held a press event this week in London to showcase its new Access Linux Powered Else device. Now being branded as the First Else, the device was introduced by Eldad Eilam, CTO of Else. Engadget provides some video coverage of the presentation, while Pocket Lint has posted a photo gallery of the device.

The First Else sports a newly designed mobile operating system called the Else Intuition platform, which is built on top of the Access Linux Platform v3.0. The device first came on the scene in late October with an appearance at Access' developer event. To date there is still no word on carrier deals or availability.