By Gerry Imhoff (stltreo), the newest member of the mytreo.net Staff Writing team.

SWEEEEET! Apparently an involuntary response caused by repeated exposure to my two sons and their friends’ incessant imitation of Napoleon Dynamite, “sweet” was the first word out of my mouth after I fired up the StyleTap® Platform. This thing really works!

I have to admit I was torn between the Trēo 700W and the Verizon XV-6700 when trying to choose which Windows Mobile™ 5 device I was going to commit to for the foreseeable future. The clincher for me was to be able to continue to enjoy the benefit of one-handed operation I had with my current (now former) Trēo 650. What I thought I’d be giving up with the 700W’s 240×240 screen, though, was access to the hundreds of PocketPC apps and games compatible with the elongated 240×320 resolution on the XV-6700. I rationalized that since I was getting this device for WORK purposes, any personal use (read: GAMING) had to be a secondary consideration, so the Trēo 700W won. Truth be told, in the back of my mind I knew the 700W would be wildly popular, so I figured it was only a matter of time until most apps were modified to run at 240×240, thus I would simply have to practice the virtue of delayed gratification.

Fast forward a few weeks to my first assignment for MyTrēo.net: I get the email from Tadd, asking me to review StyleTap®. Drat! I was hoping to be able to review one of the first 700W-compatible games. Oh well, to have any hope of doing that down the road, I figured I’d better play nice and check this StyleTap® thing out. Besides, I went with the 700W for its business-related functionality…right? Surfing to www.styletap.com, I began to read. Wait…what’s this? “Run thousands of applications for the Palm OS® platform on your Windows Mobile™ Pocket PC platform!” Surely it couldn’t be that easy – there are tons of Palm games, um, I mean business apps, out there! A one-time $30 (US) investment and I can run all the stuff I used to run on my Palm III® years ago? And any Palm app released since then? SWEEEEET!

It really couldn’t be easier. While this is technically a “preview” version, if my experience is any indication, it’s pretty darn ready for prime-time. StyleTap® offers a 14-day trial download, whose 1.3MB version 0.9.108 I hurriedly grabbed. Accepting XP’s and Windows Mobile™ 5’s download warnings that the publisher could not be verified, I chose to install the app on my 700W’s SD card. StyleTap® actually provides a couple of sample apps (HandyShopper and PilotMines), so it ended up occupying just a bit over 2MB. StyleTap®’s website offers suggestions on where to find Palm OS® downloads, so I surfed on over to their first suggestion, www.palmgear.com (note to self: We’ll have to get them to promote www.mytreo.net). Sorting the list of available downloads by ascending price (hey, I’m “thrifty”, not cheap), I looked for some of my old freeware favorites. Whoa, I didn’t remember there being this many! The internet is a beautiful thing. I downloaded Checkers, Domino!, Memorix, and Yahdice. Using the completely intuitive desktop interface installed by the StyleTap®’s download, I added these applications to the Installer and selected “Install all to device.” Seconds later they were available to the 700W’s StyleTap® Launcher – which, by the way, takes advantage of Windows Mobile™ 5’s new context-sensitive soft keys, a nice touch. Lo and behold, all four apps worked exactly as expected - properly saving state upon exit, retaining high scores, and similar functionality in each case. Later, seeking more complex apps to insure I put StyleTap® through sufficient paces, I loaded Progect, a project tracking/management tool. It uses databases (pdb’s) extensively, and yes, all were handled flawlessly.

Next, I downloaded Baseball, Jotta!, and QuickTake. First snags - Baseball returned a “Hot Paw Basic not found” error upon execution. Jotta!, a note taking / stylus drawing app, worked, but would only draw straight lines and not curves as it should. QuickTake, a Palm screen capture utility, returned a “fatal error” upon execution. (Hence, the screen shots accompanying this review are ones I “borrowed” from StyleTap®’s web site since I haven’t found a 700W-compatible capture utility yet). Thus, it would appear that apps running under StyleTap® must be what I’ll call self-contained, that is, requiring only native PalmOS® code and not 3rd party add-ons or libraries such as Basic. Additionally, while the documentation states StyleTap® supports applications doing direct screen writes, as one might expect, programmer implementation may vary, so apps that talk to other hardware without going through the Palm’s OS may experience difficulty. I’m guessing that’s what caused the screen capture utility to bomb.

I suddenly remembered my old Trēo 650 .prc file directory, and quickly loaded about 20 more apps. More than a dozen worked perfectly right out of the gate. A couple more were easily tweaked with a simple re-definition of the hard keys from Palm settings to the 700W’s directional keypad. In my experience, if the app is controlled by screen taps, it works fine. If it requires hard buttons to control, as long as the app provides a “Preferences” option to redefine those keys, it will likely work. Only one app I tried (Caverun) was too slow to operate - everything else ran with surprising pep, given this is essentially an emulated environment. One app that really surprised me was 4Cast - it worked flawlessly, including the ability to access the web to download the weather forecast. Very cool.

Note that in addition to the StyleTap® Launcher maintaining all Palm app icons with its own interface, the installer also provides a Windows Mobile™ 5 “Programs” icon for each Palm application installed. Quite frankly, the Programs list became very cluttered in a short period of time (remember, I just installed over 25 Palm apps). So I was happy to discover that using File Explorer to move all those Program icons into their own folder did not impact the functionality of StyleTap®. Additionally, the Launcher cleaned up after itself very nicely when deleting apps (removing all installed files, pdb’s, and icons), although in one case (Baseball), it left the team data files on the SD card. And, thankfully, because I initially chose to install StyleTap® on my storage card, all subsequent apps automatically loaded there as well, sparing the 700W’s precious main memory (although main memory is an optional install destination).

I would be greatly remiss if I did not mention that Toronto-based StyleTap®‘s support was nothing short of amazing. Justin, in particular, responded to each of my emails in less than one hour. While my issues did not concern technical problems (since I really didn’t have any), his responsiveness was nonetheless outstanding.

So, in conclusion, my fellow 700W enthusiasts, I am overjoyed that what I initially thought would be a fairly lengthy waiting period for 3rd party developers to retrofit their apps to the 700W can be largely overcome in one fell swoop through StyleTap®’s truly excellent product. Tadd, you sure know how to pick apps to review, I never doubted you for a second! At the risk of repeating myself…SWEEEEET!

StypeTap® Platform
$29.95 (US), $36.95 (CAD)
Version tested: 0.9.108. Free upgrade to final 1.0 release when available
www.styletap.com

Filed under: Software reviews