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StyleTap says that although Windows Mobile smartphones have begun to experience "very strong" sales growth over the past year or so, their novel display formats -- combined with the lack of the touch-screens found on Pocket PCs -- has resulted in relatively few applications being available to run on the devices.

StyleTap CEO Gregory Sokoloff stated, "The big problem in the mobile world is that it gets more and more fragmented as major vendors bring out more and more devices that are incompatible in large and small ways with the other devices on the market. Software applications that add great utility to these smartphones and PDAs tend to run on a diminishing proportion of these devices, because the developers cannot afford to re-engineer their applications for every new device that appears. The result is bad for consumers who get less useful devices and bad for developers who get smaller markets for their products."

StyleTap's solution to this dilemma, according to Sokoloff, is to leverage the broad base of Palm OS software by "enabling a diverse set of devices to run the same software applications with no re-engineering required."

The company in 2005 introduced software that allowed Palm OS apps to run on the Windows Mobile Pocket PC platform. This latest StyleTap preview release does the same for the Windows Mobile Smartphone platform, the company claims.

The company also plans to provide versions of the StyleTap platform targeting other popular mobile device OSes, including Symbian OS. Interestingly, PalmSource, which was spun out from Palm and subsequently acquired in 2005 by Access, a Japan-based vendor of mobile phone software, has announced that Palm OS apps will run on its implementation of a Linux mobile phone OS, known as ALP (Access Linux Platform).

Availability

A 14-day trial of the preview release of StyleTap Platform for Windows Mobile Smartphone, said to support all devices running Windows Mobile 5.0 for Smartphone, is available for free download on the company's website. The preview is meant to "solicit feedback from early users on any issues or problems prior to official release," the company says. Purchasers of the preview will receive an upgrade to the final release, expected within 60 days. The purchase price is about $50.

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