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Handspring Treo Now Available
miradu2000 writes: "Handspring's Treo, the revolutionary new communicator is now shipping. This has been anticipated since October. See the scoop here! This could change the world..." My guess is no, it won't change the world. But it could reduce by one the number of gadgets a lot of people carry around.
Nice price tag... Is a palm pilot + cell phone worth 400 bucks?
Color palm pilot = 200 bucks.
Ghetto cell phone = 80 bucks.
Amigori
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
A friend of mine has a Kyocera that does most of the same things (sans optional keyboard.)
What does the Treo offer over that?
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
I'm a big fan of combining technologies and making life easier as much as possible, but in this case I don't think this product would work for me. I've always had palms in the past and have always kept them in my briefcase or outside compartment of my laptop case. I've gotten to accustomed to carrying a small phone now (the motorolo v8160) to carry something as large and bulky as the treo. Bottom line, I don't wish to carry something the size of a palm in my pocket.
Great phone for those that wear cargo pants.
Technology's a battle between companies producing more idiot-proof systems and nature producing bigger and better idiots
Presumably being PalmOS based that means you can get ssh for it. However the keyboard doesn't look up to much and it doesn't look hi-res enough to do 80x24. I don't think this will replace the Nokia 9[12]10 for remote Unix administration, and to be honest that and checking Railtrack for alternate train times when the train companies fsck up *again* mid-journey are the only things I tend to use portable dial-up for.
This, like many innovations, is just another step. Handsprings are slightly more modular than other forms of PDAs, while still having the minimal power consumption associated with palm pilots.
Many people, including myself, believe that the next frontier of technology is small, portable devices that communicate with each other wirelessly, though each device has a specialized function.
In order to make that happen, we need to start with devices such as handhelds - which can be easily specialized through software, and which have readily available wireless capability.
Its true that its "Just another handheld," similar to all of the other handhelds, but its more functional. Its not like another model car, which is exactly like the previous model, except that its "new and improved" (i.e. new and the current fashion); this is another piece of the puzzle.
And it does matter that its slightly more functional. The advent of the 386 chipset allowed a whole new class of problems to be solvable that where previously too slow to do research - I know that this is the case for my field, which is computer vision. As time progresses, even more problems are being researched.
I'm looking forward to using technology such as this -perhaps even this model - in the near future (when it becomes pretty inexpensive - perhaps two or three years from now) as a module for home automation - it would be just about perfect for the purpose.
...you can't USE the pda while you use the phone.
"Oh yeah Jim, um, what's-his-name wanted me to tell you, uh, hangon a sec." *flip, beep, poke poke poke, scroll, read, fumble, flip* "Ok Jim, yeah it was so and so, and if I remember correctly he said blah blah blah."
Perhaps I'm missing something obvious, but how might you take notes, lookup information, or otherwise use the PDA part of your "phone" while you talk on it?
.sigs are for post^Hers.
They tend to do everything they do pretty badly. For example: Nokia 5550 (Phone and MP3 player. MP3 player sucks, and phone sucks too), midi/mini HIFI systems (sound generally sucks compared to a nice seperates system), Webmin (sucks compared to a set of targetted, specific config tools), etc etc etc.
You get the idea.
Also, in my humble experience, I've found a worrying number of 'combined' gadgets such as this to fail in single areas -- and be almost impossible to fix due to their advanced miniturisation.
So... Nice gadget, but I'll stick with discrete tools -- my Sony Vaio C1, Nokia 7110 and Handspring Visor Edge do their specific jobs excellently.