Palm Pre: Easter Egg and possible PSX Emulator

The Palm Pre was just recently unveiled and so far it's been generating quite a lot of news. Whether it's bad (batteries die easily) or good (features galore!) smartphone and gadget addicts are flocking to the stores to get this one.

If you bought one, you're in luck as we'll be spilling some easter eggs and a possible program that'll make your smartphone a PSP competitor. If you haven't bought one yet, then hopefully the news below will convince you to try it out.

First off, there's confirmation that a PSX emulator has been installed in the Palm Pre. See the video below:

If you're familiar with the emulation scene (and let's be honest, you are reading Engadget), then you know the name ZodTTD -- the brain behind some of the best jailbroken emus for the iPhone, including variations on the PlayStation, Game Boy Advance, and most importantly... the TurboGrafx-16. Now the master-hacker has brought his goods to the Pre, cooking up a version of psx4all on the Palm device, with the aforementioned GBA and TG16 ports on the way! Interestingly, he reports that the performance on the Pre is actually better than that of the iPhone 3GS, and of course he's hacked access to the keyboard, allowing for (more) proper control of games.

It seems that this guy wants to put a PSX emulator everywhere!

Next up on the menu is an easter egg that, besides will make your Palm Pre even cooler, will make it even easier to use your smartphone.

Here's how: when in your mailbox listing view (i.e. the top of the email app), type in RocknRollHax. It helps if you hold down Shift+ the key for the capitalized letters instead of hitting them in sequence. As Gennadiy writes, type as follows:

Hold Shift + R
ockn
Hold Shift + R
oll
Hold Shift + H
ax

Do that, and suddenly you can rotate your Pre in either the message listing mode or while looking at a specific email and view it in Landscape mode. Very helpful for those HTML-coded messages. Note however that the menu disappears when in landscape mode (just like it does in the browser).

Yes, instead of making it easier for anyone to go to landscape mode, you HAVE to input the code. We don't know whether Palm thought of just adding this on the last moment or they intentionally buried it.

There you have it Palm Pre for a day. We wonder what else holds for this phone in the next few days. Never worry, as soon as something does happen, whether it be god or not, we will post it right away!

Source for Palm Pre Playstation Emulator
Source for Palm Pre Email Landscape Mode