Running PPC programs on a Smartphone

After yesterday’s article on how to run Palm programs on a Pocket PC, it seems appropriate to share with you how you can run Pocket PC programs on a Windows Mobile Smartphone. Diary of a Mobile Addict provides the details on how to do this (thank you, Thomas, for telling me about this link). The link even mentions an application that will let you simulate screen taps on your Smartphone. Now that is slick!

Here are my caveats regarding this:

• I have only tried this with one program and the tricks turned out to not work with that program. Some developers not only use their set-up utilities to check for operating system version, they also develop their programs to check for OS version, too. Hence, one would not be able to “trick” these programs into running on an operating system for which they were not designed. That was the case for the one program I tried: before running itself, the program checks to see what the OS version is, and, since it was not a Pocket PC version, said something like “This program is not designed for this operating system.”
• Additionally, some Pocket PC programs are designed for specific screen sizes, such as 480×640 pixels, and simply would not work well (if at all) on a 240×240 pixel display. Certainly a number of games would fit into this situation.

Despite these caveats, you may very well have some Pocket PC programs that you want to run on your Smartphone and the tricks described in the above link may help you out. If you try it out, please stop back by here and let us know how well the tricks worked for you.

I think it is really great of Mordy to have researched this subject so thoroughly and to layout a series of steps for running PPC programs on a Smartphone.