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.

Comments

For those who want the scoop...

[ekrout]

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).

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_spe ed.jhtml

IPAQ and Nokia Card Phone does the same thing ...

[https]

.... but the battery life sucks. Anybody know what the battery life is on this thing?

Ugly

[Filarion]

This thing is butt-ugly. I wish Apple would make one of those.

Too little too late?

[MrIcee]

When Handspring announced their new cell/pda marriage I was very excited. I use a motorola cell phone combined with my Handspring Visor to access my remote SUN workstations when I'm out hiking or at the beach. Since the visor actually allows TELNET, etc... it can handle most of the tasks I need to do remotely (e.g., emergencies) nicely, without taking up a huge amount of room.

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.

Re:IPAQ and Nokia Card Phone does the same thing .

[gwernol]

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.

No DCS1800

[blacksmith]

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.

Revolutionary???

[markj02]

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.

Other cell+PDA combos

[I am Jack's username]

Nokia 9210 (expensive), Ericsson R380e (too low tech?), Motorola Accompli A6188 and A008.

More?

Re:Yet another palm phone....So what?

[Cato]

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.

My favorite is still...

[gvonk]

The Nokia 7650. It is so so sweeeeet. I wish we had it in the US.

Analog support

[cameldrv]

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.

Re:Color display versus Battery Life

[Locutus]

Today, getting color and good battery life isn't really possible. Especially with the screen size the Treo has.

Until Organic LED displays make it, you get color and no real battery life unless you bolt a large battery on (ala iPaq).

So you'll have to decide if you want to spend your money to show how cool you are or spend your money to get a useful/convenient product.

LoB