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Pictures Leaked of 3 new Palm handhelds
ahecht writes "On Thursday, Palm's Solutions Group's CEO Todd Bradley announced that 3 new handhelds will be released in October. Within 24 hours, pictures of all three handhelds have leaked out
on the web. The first to be released, the sub-$100
Zire, can be seen here. The second handheld,
previously known as
Oslo, now has
the name Tungsten T,
and features OS 5 and built in bluetooth (pictured
here).
The third handheld is the
Tungsten W,
pictured
here,
which is a GPRS smartphone (although it does not have a built-in speaker or
microphone). Zire will be released October 7th, while
both Tungsten models will be released on October 28th." Could just be rumors or fakes, but it seems reasonable.
There's lots of reasons to add a keypad to a handheld device, and the "bloat" is hardly more than the writing area of a standard palm handheld. First of all, it's much faster to type than to use the braindead "grafitti" of Palm handhelds (hint: use your thumbs). You can also enter text with one hand on a keyboard, whereas with a Palm you need one hand to hold it, and the other with which to write.
Of course you also need to realize that different people have different requirements. Beleive it or not, the world does not revolve around you. For you it's "pocket bloat," for me it's useability. The keyboard makes sense. Research in Motion was right all along. The new BlackBerries are much more useable than any Palm I've seen.
- j
The mantle has been passed in the Palm front. Sony has one hell of a product right now. The NR70 has 320x480 res, virtual grafitti, and can do practically everything a PPC can do, but with 1/20 the MIPs. Plus it looks a lot cooler. And did I mention that the NR70 was just discontinued? Let's see what happens when they announce their Xscale version of the NR70 in a few days. Should be an interesting next couple of months. Competition is good.
Note to get here it took two things -- Sony to pump up the Palm brand, and MS to fumble and not support Xscale routines in the PPC OS. I find it amazing, after years of Palm letting its OS rot, that the Palm OS will actually have a (rather large) advantage in at least one aspect -- ability to actually use Xscale routines and power-saving modes that will have to wait until the next version of the MS OS. Not to mention the Palm OS can use other processors as well. I would never have guessed this happening a year ago, when PPCs had a large lead in both software and hardware.