Want to play around with the Palm Pre? How bout playing with it on your computer? Well, you can, and it’s free, too! This is mainly for Windows, but you can try it on other operating systems (Linux & OS X) by using Wine (Linux) or Darwine (OS X).

If you follow this little guide, you’ll have your own Palm Pre set up in no time!

1. Download this: http://tinyurl.com/palmpremojosdk
2. When done downloading, install the SDK, and restart when finished installing.
3. Download Virtual Box by Sun: http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
4. When done download, install Virtual Box.

On your desktop, you should see a “Palm Emulator” shortcut on your desktop. Double click on this. If Virtual Box loads up, then you’re good to go. If nothing at all happened (like for me), follow the rest of this guide.

5. Open up Virtual Box, and click on the “New” button.
6. Click on the “Next” button. Give it a name. Mine is “palmpre”. Leave the other settings alone.
7. For “Base Memory Size”, I just gave it a gig of RAM (1024MB).
8. For the “Virtual Hard Disk” screen, click on the “Use existing hard disk” bubble, and go find the “nova-cust-image-sdk47.vmdk” file. It’s usually in C:\Program Files\Palm\SDK\share\emulator\images\sdk47\.
9. Click on “Finish” on the “Summary” screen.
10. With your virtual machine selected in the list on the left, click on “Settings”.
11. Click on “CD/DVD-ROM”. Check the “Mount CD/DVD Drive” box, and look for the “grub.iso” file, also located at C:\Program Files\Palm\SDK\share\emulator\images\sdk47\. Click “OK”.
12. Go to Start>Run (or Winkey+R). Type in the following:
C:\Program Files\Sun\xVM VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe setextradata “NAME OF VM” “CustomVideoMode1″ “320×480x32″

Press enter and you should briefly see a black screen. Go ahead and “Start” your Palm Pre. It should boot up very fast, and the window should be of the proper resolution.

If you want to simulate the “Home” button, just press “Escape” on your keyboard.

- ENJOY!