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Palm to Announce New Treo in September
bain writes "Reuters reports that Palm has committed to unveiling at least one of its next-gen Treos next month. It's believed that it will be the Windows Mobile-based UMTS model first mentioned for Vodafone in July." From the article: "The California-based firm said in July the new version will operate on Vodafone's high-speed third generation (3G) network and be powered by Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Mobile operating system, however details about the handset's functionality remain sketchy. The current 700p version of the latest Treo has a slot for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards, but with the latest Nokia, Sony Ericsson and O2 offerings all boasting the technology in-built, Palm knows it can not afford to fall further behind as the competition heats up."
Seriously. Palm has been in a sinkhole for many years now. Consider that last year, Palm paid PalmSource -- a company that it spun off from itself -- $30 million just for the right to use the name "Palm" again! (They'd rebranded themselves as "PalmOne" during the spinoff process, and split the rights to the "Palm Inc." name with PalmSource.)
Palm Inc. will someday be a case study for MBAs on how to take something great and drive it right into the ground.
Read my blog.
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
Palm became PalmOne (hardware) and PalmSource (software). Then PalmOne bought out the Palm name from PalmSource who were subsequently bought by Access. While most comments here are discussing the future of the Palm company, I am far more interested in seeing the future of the Access/PalmSource company and whether they can make their ambitious Linux plans pay off for them and for hardware manufacturers who might license their upcoming OS. The short story being that the next PalmSource system should allow existing Palm applications and new applications based on the Free Software layers to both operate together. In the past both IBM and Sony have licensed Palm software, perhaps the new Linux based system will have them both re-inventing portable/handheld/pda/???? with the support of a software company with no competing hardware interests.
As for BeOS, I suspect anything from it got lost in the still-born PalmOS 6. Perhaps Access/PalmSource (assuming they have it) could be convinced to release it as Free Software, they had already adopted Eclipse + prc-tools etc as a build chain and are moving to Linux as a kernel so they are familiar with the idea of using Free Software.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
I just bought a Palm Treo 700p through Sprint. It is my fifth Palm OS-based device, and replaces both a Sony Ericsson T610 (T-Mobile) and a Sony Clie UX50.
I wanted:
* Synchronization with Outlook at work.
* A data service faster than the T610's GPRS.
* A keyboard.
* Small size.
* If possible, keep using my large library of Palm OS applications.
Yes, there's no question that the Palm OS is aging fast; there's a reason why Palm OS 5.4.9 is nicknamed FrankenGarnet. However, in my mind, it's still the best choice:
* Windows Mobile (such as in the Treo 700w) - What's the point of preemptive multitasking if the user interface and phone aspects of the device are awful? The 700w's 240x240 resolution is inferior to the Treo's 320x320, anyway; text on the latter looks *great* when using a replacement TrueType-based font and FontSmoother.
* Symbian OS - I know that Symbian, thanks to its EPOC ancestry, is one fantastic piece of work. However, even if (as another poster noted) one can use Python to develop for it, in practice the third-party development community is a fraction of that for the Palm OS. The one S60-based device that has the display resolution I'd want, the N90, is a $600 GSM-only camera-hybrid monster that still doesn't come with a keyboard. And what's with the multiple, mutually-incompatible OS iterations (S60 v2, S60v3, S90, etc., etc.)? I can still run Palm OS applications I started using on my first Pilot 1000 from March 1997.
By contrast, my Treo 700p gives me:
* The same solid out-of-the-box synchronization with Outlook as with my previous PDAs. Having been able to keep around every calendar and contact entry I've made since that first Pilot 1000 is not only convenient but invaluable.
* EV-DO. It's fast enough for emergency logging into work through Windows Terminal Server with my notebook, something that "slower than 28.8K dialup" GPRS certainly couldn't do. Sprint's EV-DO network is up and rolling in 200 US metro areas.
* A tiny, but quite usable, keyboard.
* A very pocketable form factor. I'm a guy, and have no desire to start carrying a Tribbianish man-bag to carry one of those Nokia monster phones. Although the T610 and UX50 were together not hard to carry in one pocket (it helps to be a six-footer), the 700p is easier still.
* As mentioned above, access to the entire gigantic library of Palm OS applications.
* An unexpected bonus: With Sprint's PCS Business Connection service, I have push access to my work mail, meaning that the 700p has *also* replaced my BlackBerry. It's not quite as elegant as a BlackBerry, but is still quite usable. Besides, it looks like within a few months I'll be able to use either GoodLink or BlackBerry connect to make the process even more seamless.
That said, I'll be dismayed if my next phone/PDA isn't some kind of Linux- or some other modern OS-based platform. I don't care whether it's Symbian, Palm 6 Cobalt, the Qtopia Greenphone I saw at LinuxWorld, something Nokia 770-based, something Sharp Zaurus-based, etc., etc., as long as it has the above features. (Of course, I said this before purchasing the UX50, and the PDA before that, too.)
I like the idea of controlling multiple devices with a single BT master (which is what I htink you were describing) so I decided to check into this. Note that I am not an export of BT and have never read any of the specs until now. Okay, so Google pointed me to the Bluetooth website at http://www.bluetooth.com./ There you can find the architecture specs for the protocal.
The handsfree spec requires certain QoS guarantees, and imposes some requirements on the phones. For example, there can be only one handsfree (HF) device perl phone (AG). ALL sounds, including voice, KEY TONES, voice dialing, music, etc must be routed over the link to the HF device. For that reason cell for phones likely try to keep handsfree devices in the Active state for as long as they are connected. The important bits of text can be found in the Hands Free Specification, section 4.6:
To elaborate, BT slave devices can be set to either Active or Parked. Parked devices can't talk back to the phone, but the phone still needs to transmit a beacon packet every time the slaves reserved time slice comes up. Active mode devices can communicate based on one of several protocols. Handsfree requires Synchronous Connection-Oriented or SCO, which provides 64Kb CDR audio communication. It also requires that the physical link connnection remain in the Active state.
Cell phones probably have very light BT stacks, including extremely limited buffers. That probably sets a hard limit on the number of devices that they can form active physical links with. To that end, the cell makers most likely set up handsfree systems to automatically park all other physical connections.
If you were thinking that the phones should then just set up a new BT network with other non HF devices, think again.
I found this paragraph in Section volume 1, section 4.1 of the Core specification titled "Piconet Topology"
Due to use of TDMA slices as the master channel, hosting more than once Piconet with the same master (or just on the same channel) would not work. If BT used CDMA, this would be possible. It should be possible for your phone to be a SLAVE to your other devices while MASTER to the handsfree.
Lesson: there is more to this than you think. The core spec alone is 1300 pages of IEEE dribble.
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who do not.