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If you don’t mind, we’re going to stop this ‘iPhone Special’ for a while, given that there still is some intelligent life outside. We’ll do so with two emergency solutions for those who can’t wait to purchase Apple’s cell phone. First, a program to ‘turn’ your Treos and other Palms into an iPhone. And then, a DIY iPhone that you can show off in vanity snapshots.

Among these days’ comments and analysis there’s a line of thought saying that the iPhone is going to make life hard for Palm and their Treos. We don’t agree, given that they are quite different platforms, one boasting to be closed for third-party applications and another that builds on the strength of such applications. Palm still has six months to promote that strength, and Jeff Hawkins’ secret product is still waiting in the wings.

Nonetheless, some iPhone envy is understandable among ‘treonauts’ when looking at Apple’s user interface. Fortunately, somebody has decided to cure it: meet the iPhony, a program that replaces the Palm OS application launcher with another one made of iPhone icons. iPhony displays a 4 x 4 grid of fixed icons that you can tap with a stylus or your finger, but also using Palm’s 5-way navigator. Each icon can be configured to start your desired application: ‘Text’ for Messages, ‘Web’ for Blazer or another browser, ‘Mail’ for Versamail and so on.

iPhony is completely free. Right now it only works on Palm devices with a 320×320-pixel screen, such as the Treo 650 and 680, the Zire 72 and the Tungsten T2, but we’re anxious to see a later version for the 320×480-pixel screens of the LifeDrive and the T|X.

A cut-out iPhone

If you own a Windows Mobile device, or you just want to hold an iPhone in your hand, you can always get the cut-out iPhone provided by the guys at Sneakmove. You just download the PDF file, print it, cut it out and assembly it, and you get an actual size iPhone mock-up. We recommend to use cardboard or photo paper, so you can handle and it looks like the real thing. From the same page you can also download an editable version in Illustrator format, just in case you want to replace the Nemo-like screen image with another one.

(iPhony via PalmInfocenter; cut-out via PCdemano).

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