Pleco on Palm Pre - Preliminary YES

mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Just finished a quick run-through with Pleco 2.0 on the Palm Pre and I can now say that it appears to work beautifully - tested and used successfully every feature except audio (which isn't supported in the Classic emulator yet, though they're adding support for it in an update they plan to release soon). Performance is excellent, takes a while to install but it runs nice and fast after that. Controls are surprisingly usable (at least for me) even with a finger, about the only thing that seems to be really impacted by finger input is the handwriting recognizer which though usable is a bit slow - feels sort of like using it on a device with TouchFlo interfering. Hopefully they'll improve on this in a future emulator update too.

Anyway, that's the initial word on that - if anyone else who bought a Pre today wants to weigh in please feel free to :)
 
K

koreth

榜眼
That's terrific news! Do you have any idea how well will the Pre will have to sell for it to be worth your while to keep maintaining the Palm version of Pleco? I assume if it sells well that'll look less like wasted effort.

But now I know what's going to be on the top of my wish list when I get back to the US. My Treo 650 is long overdue for retirement.
 
K

koreth

榜眼
Of course, that's assuming that Palm doesn't come out with a native SDK for the Pre, which I suppose is pretty inevitable. Once that happens then I guess there wouldn't be any reason to keep the old PalmOS version under active development.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
It's not actually as much a question of how successful the Pre (and webOS - there'll certainly be other Palm phones running it by the end of the year) is in general as of how successful it is among Pleco customers - we were selling more copies of our software on Palm than on WM even back in the years when WM was considered the best mobile / smartphone OS out there. (if you dig around you can still find posts here from people begging for us to release a version of Pleco on wonderful / fast / much-better-than-Palm Windows Mobile) So we'll just look at what the ratio of WM to Palm OS activations is like and go from there.

There probably will be a native SDK eventually, but I'd imagine it'll be at least a year or so before that happens - they haven't even released the non-native web-based SDK publicly yet.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Very nice phone, incidentally, from someone who's used an awful lot of them - it's a bit less polished than iPhone but it's certainly as polished as iPhone OS 1.0 was. Multitasking is beautifully implemented, gesture system very intuitive, keyboard isn't at BlackBerry / old-school Treo level but there's no way they could cram a keyboard that big into a device with this form factor, and replaceable batteries are a beautiful thing. Fix a few glitches with Classic and it'll be an excellent system to run Pleco on.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top