Just curious. And, with some really cool iPhone apps out there, a bit desirous.

Is it possible for a whiz of a developer to work backwards from the iPhone SDK to create an emulator for the N8** that would allow us to download and use the plethora of apps for the iPhone and iPod touch? An emulator allowing us to use Palm apps has been done with Garnet. And we can spoof websites into thinking we're on an iPhone by changing the user agent.

The RX51 apparently will also have an accelerometer, which would provide even more of the Apple hardware capabilities. And a lot of the iPhone apps seem like they could easily have been written for other platforms, they just weren't (I suppose because of the relatively huge iPhone user base). Like Google Voice Search, where you just speak into the microphone and Google responds as if you had typed the query. It seems to me that all the heavy lifting is done by Google, not on the iPhone, but the iPhone is the only way (except maybe Android) I know of that you can access that cool technology.

i doubt that an emulator would work.
in order to obtain apps from the iphone/ipod touch app store itunes has to verify that you have an iphone/ipod touch most probably by a hardware id and/or esn
the ipod dev team hasnt even been able to jailbreak the 2g ipod touch

Its a very small percentage but there are developers who write towards jailbroken iPhones, for example
http://iphonexe.com/jailbroken/

Not being familiar at all with the iPhone API, the first steps to me would be to port GNUStep to the tablet and then add the missing API calls. A lack of multitouch could hurt with some apps but not all. This could work for API compatibility. I do not know what else might be needed to run the jailbroken apps without recompiling but Wine's style of making executable non-native binary formats would be the worst case.

If want the short answer yes it most likely can be not but no I don't think it will be.

Indeed, andrewfblack is right. Is it possible to write it? With enough time and effort, anything is possible. Hell, you could even get Vista to run (using massive amounts of swap ;-))

"Possible" is the wrong question. "Feasible", "likely" and "anybody working on" are much better questions. To which the answers are:

• No.
• No.
• Not that I know of.