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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."
As a longtime Palm fan-boy, it saddens me to know that my next 'device' will by a Nokia S60 phone. After playing with an old hand-me-down 6600 device for a few months now, and not needing to even use my Palm, I see that Nokia has managed the Smartphone balance impressively.
Come on! This thing runs python! You can whip up your own apps in a few minutes, without any of the kludge needed for the supposedly homebrew-friendly Palm OS.
Additionally the natively multitasking OS that is Symbian is impressive - I never really understood the advantage of this when using a Palm, but now really love the ability to jump between my calendar, text, email and Soduku mid-task without having to restart things. Very nice.
Palm fans - have a look at S60, it seems to be have a lot in common with the culture of the Palm community in the mid-90's.
N80, here I come. Sorry Palm.
The company is hoping the move to the Windows Mobile will help alleviate the concerns of Treo users who have long complained of Palm's own operating system crashing the handsets on a regular basis.
I preferred the Palm OS. Simple yet effective. And who's to say that the Windows Mobile OS won't crash just as much? Plus you have to worry about viruses and security issues with Windows. Sure it looks prettier, but I don't like the move.
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?
What's so cool about another Windows Mobile device?
Why wouldn't I want the latest and greatest symbian device, instead? Why do I even care about Palm?
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
(sigh)
It always bothers me when a news report talks about the strategic future of things, when the reporter makes a fairly fundamental mistake to show that he/she isn't really all that familiar with the subject matter. The comment that implies that Treo 700s don't support bluetooth, plus the statement about how Palm stopped selling the 650 in Europe because of standards incompatibility, show that 1, the reporter (Marc Jones) isn't familiar with Palm software, and 2, doesn't get that older phones won't be compatible with new standards, and that it's not a bad thing when sales of them stops, when there's a new phone on the block anyways that IS compatible.
I know they're both kind of minor points, but what I hate is how it casts a shadow of doubt on the whole article. It seems like the reporter is out of touch, and so I wonder what else may be wrong that I don't know well enough to spot.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
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.
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
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.
How about the no camera version of the 700p first. Can't have a camera in my phone due to work issues. Want to trade up from my 650.... If the Motorola Q had no camera, I might check it out.
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 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
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
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.)
To make a custom rom, you'll need Grack's Rom Tool. At one point you could simply download a custom rom, but PalmOne asked Shadowmite to take them down and he did. You'll have to use the tool to extract your rom, modify it, and reload it on the phone. Use this list (danger: pdf) to determine what you can and want to delete. I got rid of everything I don't use, from the tutorial to VersaMail. I added a small handful of programs I can't live without, like pFuel, CMDBar, CMDWay, DA Launcher, and SharkNav. Some apps won't work from the ROM, and cause a soft-reset loop; check against this list and above all, don't panic. I'm told it's next to impossible to brick a Treo 650 with this tool, although the old method was very dangerous, and I haven't had it happen with either. If you install an app that doesn't like running from ROM, you can warm-reset with up+reset pin and flash an updated rom. If you try apps that aren't on the list, this may take some considerable trial and error. Make careful lists of everything you change in case you need them.
You can add as much as you delete and a little more, but the smaller you keep the ROM, the more dbCache space you have. The dbCache is the memory where NVFS-based PalmOS copies the programs and runs them from; a lot of instability comes from dbCache issues. You should also check out dbCacheTool (page isn't english, but the app is) and Resco Locker; the former will automatically clear the dbCache when it runs low, and the latter will lock apps into the cache. Some instability is caused by background programs that do not properly lock themselves.
As far as app selection goes, whether ROM or RAM, that's trial and error. If you hit ##377# in the phone app on a Sprint phone it will show you what crashed the phone. Using RLock on the app may stabilize it, or just delete it. You can read this Shadowmite.com forum thread for more ## codes, but 377 is the only one I ever use. Also, this is for the 650 only! The 600 is not supported and probably never will be, at this point; the 700p is coming but it's not ready yet.
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.