Palm's been busy lately on the GSM Treo front, between the Treo 750v, their GSM Pocket PC Phone, and the Treo 680, a new consumer GSM Palm OS phone. I had the opportunity to play with the former and attend the launch event of the latter last week in midtown New York City. Read on for pictures and my thoughts on Palm's latest efforts.
Figure 1: My Treo 700w and the Treo 750v. Whoa, antennaless Treo!NYC was busy with technology press events last week in and around DigitalLife, such as DigitalFocus, where I was able to stop by the Palm booth and play with the 750v.
Figure 2: Flashless pic of the 700w vs. 750v. The screen is actually a lot clearer than what is shown here; it's very close to the 700w/wx.The 750v is a top-notch device; it has
very similar specs to the 700wx CPU and memorywise, and features quadband GSM/GPRS/EDGE and triband UMTS. Yes, I mean UMTS 850/1900/2100, supporting UMTS in the US, Europe, and even Australia! About time that a device supported everything! The 750v is also upgradeable to HSDPA via a firmware update that hasn't been offered yet.
Figure 3: Rear view of the two devices.The 750v's back is slightly more contoured than the 700w's and has a rubberized grip. It feels
really nice in the hand. I also like the speaker/camera setup; overall, the device just looks a lot cleaner. The only downside is that they gave up the SD slot for a miniSD slot, located on the right behind a door.
Figure 4: Side view.See that dimpled side panel? That fits one's thumb or pinkie naturally, so along with the rubberized grip, the 750v fits like a glove. It's remarkable how these little tweaks make the 750v so much nicer than the 700w. The top is completely clean except for the silent profile switch.
I pressed the Palm rep, but wasn't able to get any detail on anything of interest. About all I could get out of him is that Palm will indeed seek to market the 750v internationally, but absolutely no confirmation on when, where, or how much. The rumors I've heard is that the 750v will be eventually featured on Cingular, but he refused to even crack a smile or wink an eye to help me confirm this as fact or fiction. :|
If you can't wait for Cingular or Palm or whomever else they're partnering with, you might want to
check out this Engadget article; they detail how they managed to unlock a 750v and use it on Cingular's network with UMTS. They even managed to get a Blackberry Connect setup working.
Figure 5: Engadget has the device working on Cingular. The "U" means it's locked onto a UMTS signal.I've been drooling over several devices of late: Cingular's rumored 8525, the Hermes, and T-Mobile's Dash. I think I need to add this one more to the list.
Next up: the Treo 680.
The Treo 680 Press Event
As you know by now, the Treo 680 is a PalmOS device, so I'm not going to get much into the hardware. However, here's a few pictures and thoughts from the event, held at DigitalLife last Thursday.
Figure 6: The PR venue was in the back of the press area, on the fourth floor of a little pavilion in the middle of the Javits center.
Figure 7: Ed Colligan, CEO of Palm, starts the PR event.
Ed stressed Palm's mantra of "ease of use", and is intending this device to be sold at a "great price point", although they refused to elaborate on the pricing as of yet. The device is quadband GPRS/EDGE (no UMTS or HSDPA), and intended to go international quickly. The device looks very much like a Palm OS-based 750v.
Figure 8: Phil McClendon, Senior Product Manager, introducing the Treo 680.
Phil introduced the device in detail; it's Palm OS (Garnet, I'd assume, although he didn't bother to mention :P), 64MB of memory, SDIO slot, and is thinner/lighter than other Treos, featuring a 1200mAh battery (although they claim this does not affect battery life significantly).
A variety of OS improvements are included, starting with a new Phone application and on-device user guides geared towards a better consumer experience. The new applications sounded interesting to me, until I heard further details. The phone app has quick launch items, a Today screen, wallpaper, and integrated contacts. You can now ignore calls with an SMS and add a new phone number to existing contact. The device has a list of most recently used email addresses. In addition, Exchange contact sync and autosync (i.e. x-minute intervals) are supported. There's PDF attachment support, a pictures and video app, slideshow with music, voice memos, streaming media, including WMA/WMV support plugged into Blazer out of the box.
The audience seemed rapt at this feature list, but I was kind of... well... the 700w already supports most of this! The 680 is basically the 750v form factor, and the 700w customizations backported to the Palm OS, and on a non-3G device to boot. About the only value proposition of this device is its aggressive price point, which we don't even know yet, and nice form factor and colors. I'll be honest -- it does have the potential to be a great consumer device -- but I also think this proves, beyond all, that the Palm OS is strictly in catchup mode to Windows Mobile now. Even Palm's customizations on Windows Mobile have been far ahead of their customizations on Palm OS! They did demo a nice Google Maps app, but that's done by Google anyway, and we certainly have had Virtual Earth Mobile for quite some time.
Figure 9: Palm's demographic slide.
Palm is clearly intending the Treo 680 to be geared towards a broader audience than just "mobile professionals", rather, the "mobile accomplishers". To this, they are offering the device in four colors (Arctic, Copper, Crimson, and Graphite), which is a great idea, but from a technology standpoint, again, there's really nothing new here.
Figure 10: Palm will launch an aggressive advertising campaign for the Treo 680.
And that was about it. Most of the press mobbed the devices, but I wasn't particularly keen on crowding in, so I left. I didn't even take pictures of the unit. It's all available on Palm's site if you're interested in the Palm OS, but me, I'm going to stay with Windows Mobile. I think Palm basically proved their own Windows Mobile devices are far more advanced, so why should I bother with older tech? I do have to admit that the new work they've done on the form factor is very nice, and as such I'll be looking forward to the 750v. But their Palm OS technology just elicits one big yawn.
Edit: One other interesting point came up during the Q&A session at the end: the Treo 680 is not being manufactured by HTC, unlike most (all?) of their previous Treos. Palm is branching out to Inventec for this unit. It'll be good to see if Inventec manages to land other large deals; HTC has a bit of a monopoly on the new converged device market, and competition is a good thing.