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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."
Palm's not dead, it just deserves to die, as it's become another stale company - living off the past and with no vision of the future.
The platform showed such promise initially; with an admirable focus which is the antithesis of the Windows mobile 'everything but the kitchen sink' approach. Unfortunately for the last few years their desktop AND PDA software has stagnated, and their hardware is hardly sensational compared to the phones which are out now. I think the problems all started when they spun off palm-source, which is now in a death-spiral and still trying to sell products which belong in the 1990s. Watch MS carefully cut off Palm's air-supply once they become dependant on Windows CE.
Where are the PDAs with strong links between a carefully chosen set of PIM applications, which syncs seamlessly with desktops on all operating systems?
Where are the ebooks with larger screens rolled up inside them, or a projector, and which use the millions of free classics on sites like Project Gutenberg?
Where is the new mobile operating system which should have arrived years ago, tailored to these devices and their limitations?
I use a Palm LifeDrive and enjoy its built in wifi. The Treo could benefit from this, but overall they need to remember to make a product that works. Sure the Treo could pack every possible gadget possible into its case, but users are not really looking for that. WiFi is very very popular and I believe it should be integrated, but TFA has the wrong attitude. They should focus on making the device as useable as they can. The Treo is a PDA and a cell phone, not an amazing spactacular all-in-one uber device that can change the baby while transferring your call from cellular to Skype. The reason that my friends use the Treo is because it easily works.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Buzzing and lockups when battery is about 1 year old?
These problems have been in the treo's cince the 600 and still are not resolved.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Agreed. I am a longtime fan of Palm, but their smartphone line sucks hairy goat nad.
Weak bluetooth stack, no wifi capability (crippled, even), legendary instability, low memory, inability to properly use an SD/MMC card for memory, not just weak but positively craptastic phone app... all in a bulky-assed package. That's the Treo 600/650/700p.
I've moved to a Nokia 6265i with a T|X. It's still not perfect, because Palm's crippled the bluetooth dialing of their handhelds, but I can hack around that easily enough. However I cannot find a phone that doesn't lock out all bluetooth communications when a headset is connected.
Now allow me to elaborate a bit: Pair phone and headset. Pair phone and PDA. If the headset is active (audio is transferred) I can certainly understand the phone ignoring every other BT device out there; it takes a lot of horsepower to route audio. However the phone and headset are idle (no audio transfer but the connection active), the phone still ignores all other devices! You need to either shut the headset OFF or tell the phone to kill the connection. This means it's impossible to use the PDA to dial a number, and then talk on the headset without a lot of fucking around.
Unfortunately it's not just the Nokia; I've tried the RAZR and another phone whose model escapes me... What on earth is preventing the phone from allowing connections if the headset connection is not routing audio? How the blue fuck are you supposed to use your PDA to store all the numbers and just dial the phone, and use a bluetooth headset?
Back on topic: I got the 650 because it had the good screen and the Palm OS and the keyboard. The shitty phone app can be replaced with something like TAKephONE, and you can hack your way around the other intentional cripplings, but you get to a point where the instability, crappy BT and lack of Wifi just make you scream "enough!"
I'm not looking forward to this new phone; they'll just fuck it up like they always do. Palm is dead. PalmOne sucks balls.
BeOS was sold to Palm a long time ago, and they were supposedly going to use that as their next-gen OS. What ever happened to that plan? How did they now move to Windows?
It's too bad the BeOS technology will just be lost inside Palm.. I'm sure there is little chance of them open sourcing the code instead of just letting it die.
Um, Windows Mobile has run Python since 2004. It also runs Ruby and many other esoteric language environments. You should choose Windows Mobile over the soon to be obsolete S60.
I just got my new Treo 650 last month. (Not the newer 700 because the 650 is the only one that comes unlocked; the others are tied to cell phone providers.) It only seems to crash when I have the program Silkscreen installed; once I turn it off, it seems to be stable.
Unfortunately, Silkscreen provided a number of unique valuable functions. It lets me use Graffiti instead of just the keyboard, thus allowing me to use the "shortcut" key and punctuation marks like the semicolon. (I can't believe that the Treo has no way to define new shortcuts, and even to type "shortcut"-D-T-S for the date/time stamp requires that I type "s"-Alt-down-down-down --hardly a shortcut!)
Also, Silkscreen lets me push the side button to pop up a list of applications and quickly switch, rather than going to the "home" screen, paging through the categories of applications (why do the apps on the SD card have to show up on a separate screen?) and then finding and tapping on the correct icon.
Too bad. But if I'm willing to give that up, apparently the Treo is stable, albeit not as usable.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
Palm's decision to dump their OS is a good one. I've found the OS to be buggy, unstable and unreliable. Hell, it's memory management is so poor Nethack was never ported to it! My experiences with a Tungsten 2 were so bad that I ended up smashing the damn thing against the wall and going back to a paper day planner.
And you know what, I'm glad I made the transition. It's easier to look up data in the paper day planner, it's not delicate, and all I have to do is transcribe my changes into my computer once or twice a week to have a backup. Every now and then I just print up a fresh copy of the relevant pages and shred the old ones.
"Oh Noes! You can't encrypt PAPER!" I've heard a few technophiles say.
You know what, the basic Palm OS doesn't come with encryption, and the encryption applications that I experimented with were unstable and prone to data corruption.
Aside from the OS problems, I swore off Palm brand devices in general because of the miserable tech support I got. (This was BEFORE I smashed it against the wall) The bottom line is I never got any real assistance, and the replies I did get were computer generated e-mail based on keyword matching.
To make matters worse, the SOBs stalled me at every turn, and they didn't give me authorization to mail the sucker in for repair until AFTER the 30 day warranty had expired. The result was that if I'd sent it in, it would have cost me about $100, plus shipping and handling, and that was only if there was something minor wrong.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
As an owner of a new Treo 650p (about a month now) I've been quite pleased with it. It doesn't do Wifi, and that's a bit disappointing, but so far I haven't really missed it. As a Palm it's a good unit, as a phone it works well, and having them combined is a nice convenience. Battery life's been (much) better than I feared. I know my CDMA phone won't work in Europe, but that would happen with (almost) any phone I could get in the US.
I've even been playing with some of the oddball stuff, like The Core Pocket Media Player - the picture quality is much better than I expected. Many ScummVM games work, and the ones that don't, fail because they need a 640x480 screen. Doom is very nearly playable - the controls are the sticking point, the graphics are smooth.
The thing's been nice and reliable, too. The only resets have been because I was trying things that it just can't do (some games just need more RAM than this thing has, that's all). Everyone I know with a Windows-based PDA has had missed alarms at some point - you set a reminder and it just doesn't go off. I've never had that happen with a Palm.
Maybe Palm will go away - developing for the Palm OS is much more bother than for most of the others due to the way they handle memory, and the multithreading issue. But it won't be because the units themselves are so terrible.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
PalmSource was at LinuxWorld last week demoing the new OS and development environment. You can run GTK apps natively, and legacy (i.e. 68K Garnet) applications in emulation as well. The OS development environment uses User Mode Linux and Scratchbox.
They also had reference hardware on display. It was an XScale board in a clear lucite box (about the size of a laptop) with a cable going up to a screen inset into a similarly large panel. So, not at all a miniaturization mock up or proof of concept (not really needed at this point), but a working PDA form factor with a big bunch of hardware hanging off of it.
The guy I spoke to said that they were going to be shipping in a month or two to handset manufacturers, and the dev tools would be available early next year.
So, it's real, and it's Linux, but it's not shipping, and you can't walk into a store and buy a phone that uses it just yet.
BTW, at another LinuxWorld session, one factor that a Motorola VP mentioned was that makes Linux attractive is that chipsets they want to use in phones tend to have Linux drivers very early. So, he said, using Linux on the phone means that their hardware/software integration time is shortened.
Also BTW, the guy I spoke to also said that Cobalt (the fancy PalmOS 6, which I think is based on BeOS) was basically rejected by handset makers. My impression is that PalmOS 6 has been done and available for quite a while but that there were no takers, so they did the Linux thing instead.