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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.
I like my Treo 300, and it does everything it needs to do. $80 on ebay, and when I use PDANet, I pull 90-160 KiloBytes per second with a good connection. (2.7ms ping, though, so pages still take a while to load). Best of all, it doesn't use any minutes.
Hopefully, when the 650 comes out, the 600s will drop to an affordable price.
Hold the front pages everyone! It appears that the unthinkable has happened!
Get this! A company in a high-competition marketplace is going to release new products to compete with other companies!
Yes! You heard that right. They aren't going down the tried and trusted route of hanging on to the previous design, they are going to move forward, expand their offerings and try to get more people interested.
But! But! I hear you say, why would a company do such a thing?
Beats me. Sure beats me.
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.
The page was unintuitive and confusing, but here is a permalink to the story that actually works.
This has been well known in palm fan sites for a while now, and it's really obvious anyway.
This is also really good for the consumer, cause, if you haven't noticed, the Treo 600 is a really great device (best PDAphone combo out there), buuuuuuut, it continues to stick around the $500 price tag at the phone retailers. For me, that's way too much to pay for either a phone OR a PDA. What having a complete lineup will do is finally bring the 600 down into mainstream prices.
I've always loved Palm, but I see dark clouds ahead. The company always produced lovely and functional PDA's but totally missed out on the smartphone thing. Handspring got it right with the (still) brilliant 270/300 ... and they really had gold in their hands. They were at least one year ahead of the pack. Unfortunately they lacked money to bring it in great numbers to the GSM markets ...
.... when you use you TREO for calling you might make it through one day, but use GPRS to browse or for email. I mean: it simply doesn't last a day at all.
...
... for daily operations I rely on the Symbian powered P900. The OS is still not as userfriendly as that of the Palm, but the P900 at least gives me 4 days on a battery while really using my phone with camera and GPRS (email, chat, browsing), or my phone as wireless modem for my powerbook.
When Palm bought Handspring, the TREO 600 was just released. And you could tell that Handspring had rushed the smartphone to the market in order to survive. The 600 was simply not completely finished. It lacked BlueTooth and suffers from all kinds of small annoying things. Then there is the battery life
But then Palm bought Handspring and I really hoped they would iron out the not-so-great stuff and release a 610 or so as a quick makeover. But they choose to upgrade their PDA-series 5 times or so, even releasing $89 Zire PDA's and let the TREO 600 battle it out against the smartphones of real phonemakers. Not a very wise thing to do. Especially not when you take into effect that they also missed the RoutePlanner market in Europe. I mean, the lousy PocketPC (my opinion) took a huge bite out of the market, because they offered those carkit solutions with route planners. Palm lagged by 18 months or so... it has cost them dearly.
SonyEricsson definately did a better job. They at first released the also not-so-great P800 and followed that one by the much better P900 and now, when Palm just announced that the releasedate of the TREO 650 is being pushed back from October to January, SonyERcisson is releasing the P910
For me for the time being the Palm era is over. My TREO 270 died a month ago (but I still love it) and I only use my Tungsten T (also a very good device) as a route planner
Engadget has pics of the Sprint version of the Treo 650 here: http://www.engadget.com/entry/2487384516216828/
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.