When I was a Palm OS user, MyTreo used to be one of my favorite Palm news, review, download and discussion sites. For several years MyTreo had a mobile version of their forums created with Simple Machine Forum’s (review) built in mobile support, but the rest of the site was a bit less mobile friendly.

I don’t have any Palm OS devices anymore and hadn’t visited MyTreo in quite awhile. I was pleasantly surprised when I dropped by the site yesterday and discovered that they now have mobile versions of everything; the news blog using Alex King’s WordPress Mobile Plugin, two mobile versions of the Forum (Regular and Lite) and a mobile version of MyTreo Downloads. The download store is particularly impressive. It’s a searchable database of thousands of open source, freeware, shareware and commercial Palm OS and Windows Mobile games and applications. There are screenshots and user reviews for almost all of them. They even have the hard to find, now that Palm has abandoned it, IBM Java run-time needed to use Opera Mini on Palm devices.

I have to laugh when I hear claims that Apple created the first viable mobile application distribution model with the iPhone App Store. For six years starting in 1998, I downloaded and installed Palm executables by the hundreds From “App Stores” like MyTreo, EuroCool and Palm Open Source (PDA version), all of which are still around. So what is it that the Apple store does that those didn’t?

Mobile Link: mobile.mytreo.net

Ratings: Content: Usability:

Filed in: Mobile Site Directory – Palm