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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.
For those who want the scoop, there's a video available with the co-founder of this neat little gadget (he also was the inventor of the Palm Pilot that many have come to love).
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The formats supported are RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, and QuickTime. It's available in 56k, 100k, and 300k flavors.
I just watched it and thought it was kind of neat.
http://www.handspring.com/products/treo/choose_sp
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
.... but the battery life sucks. Anybody know what the battery life is on this thing?
like the palm 705, this one has no gprs.
so you can just use it for wap and email.
the absence of a proper internet connection
make this product half-baked.
For faster speed you can use the nokia communicator, but neither the nokia, the palm
or the handspring has triband, so you can not use
them everywhere.
Also none has bluethooth; so even with the nokia
if you want to browse the internet on a laptop
via one of those devices, you are screwed.
Better wait for the next generation or if you
do not mind the weight, get a cheaper palmtop and
a phone with gprs, triband and bluetooth.
This thing is butt-ugly. I wish Apple would make one of those.
--[Nothing important]--
I love my Visor phone and the main advantage, and the reason I bought one was the components - if the Visor breaks - I just go out and buy another one. Same for the phone. With hopefully little downtime in between.
If the Treo breaks I'm hosed for either a lot of $$ or time cause I'll have to send it somewhere for repairs. Sorry but I'll keep my old stuff.
The only problem I have with my cellphone/visor is that the cell phone, visor and it's cable... are bulky when taken all together.. not exactly what you want on the beach, or during a hike on 2000 ft. cliffs (not to mention that I've already lost the cable twice). I thought the new device would be great... all-in-one, etc.
But I'm less and less impressed. First... they did not include the Handspring port - citing some bull about wanting to have two distinct product lines... this is a major down point for me because if I want to *replace* my visor, I can't without also losing all the modules I purchased. Secondly... other companies beat them to the punch and already offer cell phones married to full functioning PDA's.
So as far as I can tell... too little, too late.
The Time.com article quotes the need for daily recharging.
I'd say this is about right. My VisorPhone requires recharging once a day if I'm using it to make calls, it will last nearly 3 days on a full charge on standby. I'd guess the power drain of the Treo is similar to a Handspring+VisorPhone.
Sailing over the event horizon
I used to have a handheld with a color display though and frankly the battery life of that thing sucked. If they make a Treo with color display, I sure hope that battery life will still be acceptable (showing off to my collegues for 1 hour per battery-loading seems sufficient for me).
<Sig>The good thing about having a good memory is ... euh
Hmm. It's a bit strange - most dual band phones support 900/1800, but this one appears to be 900/1900. That cuts out quite a large proportion of European users. It makes no mention of data rates either, so I assume it doesn't support HSCSD. That limits it to 14.4 kbps, which is pretty restrictive for a "Communicator" device.
The Japanese have had such devices for years, and as a bonus their devices aren't eyesores. Yes, they don't have the sheer organizing power of a Palm, but anybody who can actually use this thing to its full extent probably has a secretary already. Now, I'd like to say that the advantage of having a secretary is that he or she can double as a fling during the office XMAS party, but given the 60% obesity rate in America, it's more likely than not that your secretary will be a fatty in scrubs filling her keyboard with pork rind crumbs instead of a hotty in a miniskirt. And if you've never seen a cute male admin assistant in a mini, you've not been living, baybee!
Oh, and until PDAs have good handwriting recognition software again, they can all go straight to the steaming pits of Hell. Or my crotch. Same diff.
SprintPCS has a second generation device available, the Samsung SPH-I300. Color display, virtual Grafitti, dual-mode, external connection for hooking up your laptop, full HTML browser, voice recognition, second LCD (for Caller ID), among other features. It's also pretty compact. They also still offer the Kyocera. The Treo isn't bad, it may be "always on-line", and maybe you want GSM for one reason or another, but it doesn't look "revolutionary" to me.
More?
Add voice recognition capability!
How many people have phones now that you can add voice tags to people's numbers? This should actually be rather easy to implement in the Treo, I'd imagine. (I didn't see it explicitly stated in the review.) Imagine just saying someone's name, and their business card comes up and it asks you if you want to dial their number. Sounds like a winning deal to me.
Other than that, add some Bluetooth or 802.11b capability in there. Then I can use this as an uplink for my laptop. Or I can beam business cards with RF instead of IR. Or imagine being able to zap someone your business card through SMS. That's another cool feature.
These devices are almost there. We're almost to convergence, and I think I'll wait a generation or two and take another serious look at it.
You can get a version without the keyboard, but I suspect I'll get the keyboard one just to make email and SMSing easier, even though I've used Graffiti for some time now. I doubt if there's any more scrolling, as Palm-compatible screens are always 160x160 (or double in some cases) - more squinting though...
:)
I have voice dialling in my Ericsson phone and I never use it, but then being a Euroid living in LondonI don't drive as much as some people
As for having to activate dialup and get an ISP - that's a feature of the service, not the phone. The 9600 bps connection may also be a service issue, it depends on the GSM network I think.
GSM may not be useful where you live, but it works well around the rest of the world. I'll wait for the GPRS-enabled version (although one UK poster on this thread says he has been using that version for 2 weeks) so I can get always-on and about 40-50 Kbits/sec. Does anybody know how many GPRS slots the GPRS version has, up and down?
Really it's horses for courses - if you prefer CDMA service for where you live/travel, go for the Kyocera (though I think Handspring have a deal with Qualcomm to do a CDMA product in the future). If you prefer GSM, go for the Treo.
The Nokia 7650. It is so so sweeeeet. I wish we had it in the US.
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
I don't understand how Handspring expects to sell too many of these with single-mode GSM. GSM only may be fine in Europe where everything is GSM, but in the USA, if you travel, you need to be able to fall back to Analog. A great part of the utility of having a mobile phone is being able to use it while travelling, particularly in a semi-remote area. You would have to buy another phone for backup with the Treo. It's built in on the Kyocera or Samsung phones.
Treo is smaller...so what, the Kyocera is almost too small as it is.
We have the new generation Kyocera Palm phone at the office and use it as a demonstration phone for certain applications. We can't pawn this phone off on ANYONE to carry as their personal phone though. It's cool, but it's too damn big. You look like you're holding a 1st gen brick cell phone up to your head when you talk. NOBODY has ever said "it's too small as it is"!!!
They also made the Treo smaller by using a smaller screen then the Kyocera, so enjoy your scrolling.
What are you talking about?! The Treo has 160x160 pixel screen. It will require no more scrolling than a regular Palm or your Kyocera.