Garnet VM turns your Nokia into a Palm

Is it too soon to be nostalgic about the Palm Pilot?

Anyone still hankering for the glories of PalmOS (and disappointed that Palm have dumped it in favour of Windows Mobile in several recent devices) would do well to grab a Nokia N770, N800 or N810 tablet and a free copy of Garnet VM.

Garnet is essentially PalmOS decoupled from the Palm brand (the result of some rather complex license wrangling) and the Garnet VM is a vitual machine for running Garnet on top of the Nokia tablet’s flavour of Linux.

Running Garnet in this way will give you A) a glowing sense of geeky pride and – more importantly – B) access to tens of thousands of PalmOS applications and games.

Garnet comes bundled with PalmOS standards such as Addressbook and Memopad and claims 80% compatibilty with existing PalmOS apps. PalmOS has a huge shareware and freeware library and this could be a simple way to squeeze a lot more functionality out of your Nokia tablet.

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