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.

Re:Treo 300

[erick99]

I think this is the relevant part of the interview that confirms the Treo 650 rumor.

PJA: Let's talk straight for a moment, Ed. There have been marketing pix of the Treo 650 out on the web for months, and in the past week, at least 2 people have had Sprint reps let them use and photograph actual T650's. The cat is out of the bag, so to speak... Handspring embraced the web community, and leveraged them to build a lot of pre-release buzz for the 600. Why is pa1mOne issuing all the 'no comments'?

EC: Were not being cagey...we have a plan for release and marketing of the next-gen Treo...and the Treo family. We appreciate the fact that there's a lot of interest built up already. However, we're not going to be rushed by any news leaks on the web.

PJA: Sooooo...there will be a next-gen Treo? Will it be released before the end of the year?

EC: Absolutely! We will be making an announcement soon.

Good, and Obvious

[GarfBond]

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.

iPalm?

[Doc Ruby]

There hasn't been any real question of whether PalmOne would continue their Treo line, especially when rumors of a Treo "Ace" were confirmed by announcements of the 650 with Ace features, in the rumored Ace release window (2004Q4, possibly even October). Palm spun Handspring "back in" on the strength of its Treo 650 last year. The real question is why they'll keep splitting/confusing their market by selling two "tops of the line", a T5 and a Treo 650, with similar features, instead of a single combined unit that's second to none. The other compelling question is whether Apple would finally spend that fat bankroll they've nursed for decades, rolling all that Palm/Handspring tech into a musical iPhone that changes the world even more than did the original Macintosh. Steve Jobs, please "Reply to This" .

Re:iPalm?

[afidel]

Steve doesn't want to get into the smartphone market because he can't controll the experience enough. They wouldn't controll the price, they wouldn't controll support, and they wouldn't controll the network it runs on (unless they did an exclusive deal which would be stupid as it would be too niche a market to justify the development costs). Not only that but Steve seems to have a personal grudge against PDA's since the Newton was the first project he killed on his return since it was a pet project for the man that ousted him.

Re:Love it, but the $

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's what's funny. I've been a Palm guy for years, starting with a III, moving to a IIIx, and jumping to a cheap little Clie SJ-30. I've used the hell out of these things.

I just got in on the Amazon -$175 (they upped it!) deal on the T610. I was thinking of using the money to upgrade my battered SJ-30. But first I used the phone's built-in Bluetooth to sync wirelessly with iSync on my Mac (it just worked). And then I used the phone's included XTNDConnect software to sync with Outlook via the IR port on my work Win2k laptop. And with about 10 minutes of work, my contacts, calendar, and task list are synced across both of my laptops, my phone, my Palm -- and even my iPod. Without a sweat. I was kind of amazed; I can enter a new contact on my phone, and it appears *everywhere*. Neat.

And then I realized: hey, wait. If I've got all my phone numbers, my Outlook calendar, my task list, a better ringer for reminders and Mophun games on this phone, why the heck am I carrying around this Palm? Graffiti? I never enter any more than a line of data. I figured I could put up with T9.

And so I stopped carrying around my Palm. It's a couple of weeks later, and my Palm is sitting dejectedly in its cradle. The T610 isn't even a Palm or WinCE smartphone.

Pretty cool for a phone they paid me $175 to carry. Score this round: SonyEricsson 1, Palm 0.

I'm not a huge fan of my treo 300.

[Mustang Matt]

It has some really annoying "features"

1. The battery is internal so it's not easily pulled/replace (see comment 2)

2. Sometimes the palm OS will crash and there will be a reset button on the touch screen but it's so locked up you can't hit it, and the phone's power button won't work either so you have to leave the screen open until the battery completely dies.

3. This phone's SMS doesn't work with Sprint's network so the keypad is only really useful for managing the phone book.

4. Treo 300 doesn't have built in modem software like my old Kyocera 6035 so I can't hook it up to my laptop and dial up to anything. I might be able to use Sprint's vision software but I'm not sure if there are additional charges for that.

5. It doesn't use the standard audio jack for the headset. I thought my phone was broken until I discovered there was a special headset for it. I'm not sure what the difference is. It's still mono with a mic. I can't imagine what different wiring patterns there would be.

6. Battery life isn't great.

7. No bluetooth! (I don't think the Treo 600 has it either.)

8. I can't sync it up with Mozilla Sunbird! (yet) but this is no fault of Palm's I suppose.

9. It seems like I have to go into sprint and get PRC updates more often than I did with other phones. This might be a sprint thing I'm not sure.

10. It's not a very bring screen.

Overall I'm glad I bought this phone used off ebay for $100 vs paying new prices for it. I wouldn't buy it again.

Re:Too little too late

[Fnkmaster]

While I agree with most of what you say, I reached the opposite conclusion. The Treo 600 has some annoying issues, but is still the best SmartPhone on the market. Yes, the P900 comes closest, but it can't really compete with Palm OS for usability, application availability and power/simplicity balance.

The one thing the P900 does well is BT, which is nice, but with the Treo 600 my need for BT is much more limited, since the data capabilities are quite excellent, and the thumb keyboard makes real email, SMS and IM applications usable. Yes the GPRS battery suck problem is an issue, so I let it disconnect when it's not being used, since reconnection takes a pretty trivial amount of time. I have almost never used enough data in one day to suck the battery dry, I think it's happened to me twice. Yes, it is fishy that I can use the thing for 3 or 4 days of regular voice use without needing a recharge, and one to two days with modest data use, max, but this is a small compromise to make for the power of this phone.

Hopefully Palm One will continue to offer their upgrade program in the future so I can get the promised improved battery life and bluetooth in the Treo 650 for a reasonable price. Then my life would be truly complete. I just hope Palm keeps delivering, so I don't have to stoop to getting a Symbian device... ugh.

URL for Ed Colligan interview

[pjarts]

Hi, I did the interview with Ed Colligan for Palm Addict. The correct URL is: http://palmaddict.typepad.com/palmaddicts/2004/10/ _this_morning_i.html PJ Arts