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Palm One Says They'll Develop Cell-Phone Line
Sammy McLoughlin writes "Palm Addict interviewed Ed Colligan, Palm One's president, who finally put an end to the speculation of the Treo 650. According to the interview, the Treo range of Palm cellphones / organizers will be expanded. The Treo 600 will also be retained." The story's permalink doesn't seem to work for me, but search for "Colligan" within the Palm Addict page for this short but interesting exchange.
Great move from Palm, especially to counter MS' Smartphone and/or PocketPC Phone Edition. If Palm can manage decent battery life - especially important because people don't want their PDA to die out when their phone dies too - Palm could have something here.
The new product lines will be something to keep your eye on, even more interstingly how this will affect their normal PDAs with PocketPC's rising market share.
You can buy a decent Sony Ericsson T610 phone for -$150 with a year's service committment, and buy a decent palm for $99 for a net cost of -$50.
Buy a Treo 600 instead and you have a net cost of at least $300 after activation, a difference of $350. WTF?
There's no way it costs $350 more to make a Treo 600 than a decent cell and palm. No wonder Palm stock is tanking! Everyone I know would buy one, but they've priced it out of reach of the vast majority of people.
Sure, Palm One's Treo's are nice. But a lot of us don't want our cell phones built into our PDA's. And some of us in medical and security conscious fields can't bring cell phones into work environments. Unfortunately, it looks as though Palm One is putting all their development into Phones, at the expense of their PDA's.
I had $400 bucks put aside to buy the new top of the line Palm PDA. I'd heard the T5 was about to be out, and was ready to buy it day one. Then I read the feature list and was shocked to find it has none of the new features I was looking for.
It is a horribly disappointing device. It has no Wi-Fi, they've removed the voice recorder and vibrate alarm that was present in the T3, and they've made it out of plastic instead of the T3's metal housing. It has no camera, only a single memory slot, which means no place at all for an external memory card if a Wi-Fi card is installed.
And that new multi-media version of Palm OS? The one based on BEOS? The one that was released to developers nearly a year ago? No it isn't present either. They're using the same old Palm OS that's on every other Palm device on the market.
Sony is of course out of the Palm PDA market, but devices they released 8 months ago are still better than what was just announced by Palm. It's sad really, I don't want to buy a WinCE machine, but the only machines with big hi-res screens, built in Wi-Fi, removable batteries and featuring full multimedia support are WinCE.
Message to Palm: Get off your butts, crash develop a feature laden, high end PDA (not cell phone) and release it in the next few months. Either that, or just cede the entire high end PDA market to the WinCE machines. Or hell, just license one of the many Taiwanese designed WinCE PDA's and drop PalmOS on it.
Errr... Do you have a point? I mean, the Treo 300 is very old, I'm not sure how it's supposed to relate to this artical.
True, in the US the TREO 600 is marketleader, but face it: other phonecompanies really haven't put much effort in the 'split standard' us market. Real smartphones (like the P900 and the P910) are only now coming to the US in huge quantities. In the rest of the world, TREO is non-existent and to my frustratation, the are even outsold by the all those windows smartphones ....
... the TREO is no macht here.
.. phonebooksize limited to memory (and extendeble with Memory Stick Duo's), very extended addresscards per entry. I mean: I use Isync (MAC) to synchronise with the standard (very flexible) addressbook of my MAC. Some of my contacts have 7 phonenumbers... no problem. Have never been able to get that right in my Palm. Not even using their own software.
... so after Newton came Palm.
About the point of the 600 you mention:
1) exportable extende call log (want to see who you called on 6/1/2004? you can, mine goes all the way back to 5/20/2004, and each with length of call, etc); The P900 has that too. You have a major call history. If you add an 'advanced phone manager', you have very advanced features regarding to whitelisting, blacklisting, etc. I couldn't find it for my TREO600.
The P900 standards comes with support for WAV, MP3's as ringtones and you can make userlists. Every list (or every user) can have his own MP3 (complete songs, if you want it), every MSG (SMS, MMS) can have it's own song, every emailaccount can have it's own song
2) Multiple #s per name, phonebook size limited only to memory Same on the P900
And Symbian has flash memory. So, if you run out of juice, you don't loose any information at all. Never.
3)SMS (with conversation grouping ability so you have better idea of who you are talking with) Nothing special really. Look at the standard Message facilities of the P900. It supports multiple POP accounts (currenly I read 12 or so), advanced SMS & MMS features (although I wonder who will use the MMS).
4) it fits in my jeans pocket The 600 looks okay, but the Candybar formfactor is better. That's why Blackberry just released a candybar. It has an external antenna... maybe needed in the US, but not necessary in Europa and the rest of the world.
5) I get around 90-110kilobit/sec transfer rate, probably the fastest you can get next to the newest GSM EDGE phones. Yeah, but not for a day. Use it for three hours and your battery is dead. The P900 is justs as fast, but can hold out for 2 days very intense GPRS use or 4 days average use (checkin mail, chatting).
6) HTML compliant web browser that displays graphics, javascript Hahaha, the standard TREO 600 browser is just a laugh. Not even better than the standaard Symbian P900 browser. But who cares on Symbian for the standard browser. We have Opera.
7) Palm software base.. no discussion there See, see that's what I thought. I have owned a Palm since the '90's and was one of the first in Holland to have 'm and I have owned the complete range (till T1). Even got a special edition of the V from Palm, because I sold a big bunch of it to a customer.
Since the Atari Portfolio (early 90's) I rely on PDA's
Anyway, I have tons of software for my Palms, both freeware as paid stuff. When I switched to Symbian, I really wondered about how to go without all that software.
But for Symbian there already is an awfull lot of software available. Not as much right now as for Palm, but they are picking up. And all major Palm aplications are available for Symbian (including Bugme, Worms and Quickoffice).
And - although not for me - they have awesome games on Symbian. Really nice, full screen games for which you just put your handheld in an landscape mode to have a small game console. Like I said, not for me, but a lot of people love it.
8) mp3 player with SD for storage The media department is much better developped on Symbian. Palm doesn't even come close. I mean, the P900 has a vid