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Palm One Says They'll Develop Cell-Phone Line 83

Posted by timothy from the who-better dept.
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.
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Palm One Says They'll Develop Cell-Phone Line More

Palm One Says They'll Develop Cell-Phone Line

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  • Treo 300 (Score:5, Informative)

    by karmatic ( 776420 ) on Saturday October 09, 2004 @08:40PM (#10482660)
    I like my Treo 300, and it does everything it needs to do. $80 on ebay, and when I use PDANet [junefabrics.com], I pull 90-160 KiloBytes per second with a good connection. (2.7ms ping, though, so pages still take a while to load). Best of all, it doesn't use any minutes.

    Hopefully, when the 650 comes out, the 600s will drop to an affordable price.

    • Re:Treo 300 (Score:3, Interesting)

      by erick99 ( 743982 )
      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 no

    • "I hate the IT color scheme, too."

      What happened to all the posts with links to alternative color schemes? I used to be able to quickly scan through the story and find links like

      Readable if garish [slashdot.org]

      Traditional [slashdot.org]

      Readable and pretty [slashdot.org]

      Valiantly defiant [slashdot.org]

      Gross but accurate [slashdot.org]
      all over the place. Where have they gone?

      Is slashdot really better off making people find a CSS hack that changes the color scheme (and disables all the ads) on it. pages? Wouldn't it make more sense to enourage the simple use of

      • Hi there is a really simple way to change the color scheme.
        Simply edit the url you are currenlty in and remove the part before slashdot.org

        so if it is it.slashdot.org/comme.....
        just make it slashdot.org/comme.....

        And if there is a special color you want you can just put the color scheme you want.
        Ciao
        • "Simply edit the url you are currenlty in and remove the part before slashdot.org"

          But then it appears separately in my browser history, which makes it harder to find the sites that I would really like to visit. If it is a clickable link (like the five I made), then it doesn't appear separately. Given the way that I use my browser (frequent visits to a constantly changing list of recently visited sites), it is actually easier for me to post my own clickable link and use that than it is for me to edit the
    • Are you sure you're talking about kilobytes? GPRS is only about 42kbps (this is kilobits)...

  • Technology Company releases new Technology Shocker (Score:4, Funny)

    by hattig ( 47930 ) on Saturday October 09, 2004 @08:47PM (#10482709) Journal
    Hold the front pages everyone! It appears that the unthinkable has happened!

    Get this! A company in a high-competition marketplace is going to release new products to compete with other companies!

    Yes! You heard that right. They aren't going down the tried and trusted route of hanging on to the previous design, they are going to move forward, expand their offerings and try to get more people interested.

    But! But! I hear you say, why would a company do such a thing?

    Beats me. Sure beats me.

  • Heh predicted this weeks ago (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Mike Rubits ( 818811 ) on Saturday October 09, 2004 @08:50PM (#10482730)
    Great move from Palm, especially to counter MS' Smartphone and/or PocketPC Phone Edition. If Palm can manage decent battery life - especially important because people don't want their PDA to die out when their phone dies too - Palm could have something here.

    The new product lines will be something to keep your eye on, even more interstingly how this will affect their normal PDAs with PocketPC's rising market share.

  • Love it, but the $ (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jchristopher ( 198929 ) on Saturday October 09, 2004 @08:57PM (#10482761)
    Love the Treo 600, had a chance to play with one, but can't justify the price. It's been out over a year and there really haven't been any big price drops.

    You can buy a decent Sony Ericsson T610 phone for -$150 with a year's service committment, and buy a decent palm for $99 for a net cost of -$50.

    Buy a Treo 600 instead and you have a net cost of at least $300 after activation, a difference of $350. WTF?

    There's no way it costs $350 more to make a Treo 600 than a decent cell and palm. No wonder Palm stock is tanking! Everyone I know would buy one, but they've priced it out of reach of the vast majority of people.

    • This is too true.
      You can't get market share if you don't subsidize it. I mean, if I'm spending that kind of $$$, I'll get a iPaq.

    • Re:Love it, but the $ (Score:2, Interesting)

      by 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

  • The link to the story.... (Score:5, Informative)

    by hawkstone ( 233083 ) on Saturday October 09, 2004 @08:57PM (#10482764)
    The page was unintuitive and confusing, but here is a permalink to the story that actually works [typepad.com].
  • In europe, the PDA has been taken over by the cellphone. Why would you need a separate device when your phone can already do it all? Its just gadgetry for the sake of it.
    • I still use my Palm Tungsten C. Why? I like my cheap AT&T Wireless service on a cheapo cell phone -- though sometimes the antenna on the phone is lousy. I don't want to have to pay outrageous amounts for data services when anywhere I'd want to get online has free WiFi anyway.

      And besides, cellular pisses me off far too much to at this time be mixed into something as reliable (as long as I don't use the web browser -- but that's why whe have PSSH and Unix boxes for the /. fix). The hardware is uncomf
  • Will technologies merge? It seems to me that everything is doing everything. Mobile phone - organiser, notebook - mobile phone, tv - dvd player. Are we going towards having just a handfull of devices that are capable of doing many related thing.

  • Good, and Obvious (Score:5, Interesting)

    by GarfBond ( 565331 ) on Saturday October 09, 2004 @09:09PM (#10482848)
    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.
    • For me, that's way too much to pay for either a phone OR a PDA

      But it's NOT a phone or a pda. It's both. Yes, I'll definitely give you that it is pricey. Having just recently received one as a gift I didn't have to know the pain of the outlay, but I will say that it is sweet getting rid of an old phone that I hated and now having to carry around one less device. I really like the Palm OS and the Treo600 as a phone is about a hundred times better than the ancient Motorola V120 that I had.

  • Too little too late (Score:5, Informative)

    by Akimotos ( 747459 ) on Saturday October 09, 2004 @09:13PM (#10482862)
    I've always loved Palm, but I see dark clouds ahead. The company always produced lovely and functional PDA's but totally missed out on the smartphone thing. Handspring got it right with the (still) brilliant 270/300 ... and they really had gold in their hands. They were at least one year ahead of the pack. Unfortunately they lacked money to bring it in great numbers to the GSM markets ...

    When Palm bought Handspring, the TREO 600 was just released. And you could tell that Handspring had rushed the smartphone to the market in order to survive. The 600 was simply not completely finished. It lacked BlueTooth and suffers from all kinds of small annoying things. Then there is the battery life .... when you use you TREO for calling you might make it through one day, but use GPRS to browse or for email. I mean: it simply doesn't last a day at all.

    But then Palm bought Handspring and I really hoped they would iron out the not-so-great stuff and release a 610 or so as a quick makeover. But they choose to upgrade their PDA-series 5 times or so, even releasing $89 Zire PDA's and let the TREO 600 battle it out against the smartphones of real phonemakers. Not a very wise thing to do. Especially not when you take into effect that they also missed the RoutePlanner market in Europe. I mean, the lousy PocketPC (my opinion) took a huge bite out of the market, because they offered those carkit solutions with route planners. Palm lagged by 18 months or so... it has cost them dearly.

    SonyEricsson definately did a better job. They at first released the also not-so-great P800 and followed that one by the much better P900 and now, when Palm just announced that the releasedate of the TREO 650 is being pushed back from October to January, SonyERcisson is releasing the P910 ...

    For me for the time being the Palm era is over. My TREO 270 died a month ago (but I still love it) and I only use my Tungsten T (also a very good device) as a route planner ... for daily operations I rely on the Symbian powered P900. The OS is still not as userfriendly as that of the Palm, but the P900 at least gives me 4 days on a battery while really using my phone with camera and GPRS (email, chat, browsing), or my phone as wireless modem for my powerbook.

    • Re:Too little too late (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Then there is the battery life .... when you use you TREO for calling you might make it through one day, but use GPRS to browse or for email. I mean: it simply doesn't last a day at all.

      Have you ever used a Treo 600? By the sounds of it you're just guessing that it loses charge quickly, because I've owned one for a good 6 months now and have to say it's got a fantastic battery life.

      I took it away to a festival in August, a whole weekend away from everything. I hadn't bothered charging it for a couple o
    • The problems with Treo600 are being addressed -> Treo650 has BT, removable battery, better camera.

      However, overall, in terms of the US market, SE P800/900 phones have not been nearly successful as the Treo600. How would I know? Just look at the phones offered by all of the major wireless carriers. You will see a Treo600 at/near the top of the Smartphone category from all of the major carriers (except Nextel). I'd say this is the testament of Treo600's popularity.

      I own a Treo600 myself and can't live wi
      • True, in the US the TREO 600 is marketleader, but face it: other phonecompanies really haven't put much effort in the 'split standard' us market. Real smartphones (like the P900 and the P910) are only now coming to the US in huge quantities. In the rest of the world, TREO is non-existent and to my frustratation, the are even outsold by the all those windows smartphones ....

        About the point of the 600 you mention:

        1) exportable extende call log (want to see who you called on 6/1/2004? you can, mine goes
        • I don't see what all the fuss is about with these treo & SE phones. In the coming weeks the Nokia Communicator 9500 http://nokia.com/phones/9500 [nokia.com] is coming out and will blow them all out of the water:

          Symbian OS (like the P900)
          Wifi, Bluetooth and GPRS
          Great keyboard (not like the Treo)
          Great battery life

          I've seen a lot of people scribbling away on their keyboard-less pda's and for me it remains an inferior method of text input. Ever tried doing an ssh session with a pen? The Treo's keyboard is a joke.

          Mai
          • The 9500 is much too large for me. And the keyboard still is no good. I mean, from an usibility point of view, I think I even prefer the TREO keyboard over the 9500, since the formfactor of the TREO is better than that of the 9500. You have to put down the 9500 to make good use of the keyboard. If there is the luxury of puting the thing down, I prefer the BlueTooth keyboard for the P900 over the extra size thumbboard of the 9500.
            • It's not out yet so it would seem you couldn't have tried it yet. The 9300 is a lot smaller apparently if that's a biggy.

              The 9110 and 9210's that I owned before had a very usable keyboard, that really can't be compared to the Treo. (yep I tried a 600 too)

              The 9210 keyboard is very usable even while walking because you support the device with your hands while typing with your thumbs. That works pretty well. No need to put it down at all.

              Try one before knocking it...
              • We have had an early 9500 for a testdrive regarding applications we produce for a mobile provider. I played on it for 3 hours or so. Simply not my tool. It is a very nice tool with all the wireless features. It even supports EDGE if I'm quite correct. However, I think it is too big to carry it around. In that aspect, the size of the 9300 indeed would appear to be much better. Haven't seen that one come in the house yet.

                I don't know why I can't get used to the Nokia 9000 series. I mean, in the past for ov
              • One other thing ... in contrary to those three hours on the 9500, I did have 4 weeks to really test the P900. And - also important - the 9500 was just tested on the application intended (and playing maybe 45 minutes with email and browser), while the P900 was to be used in a situation with lots of email, browsing and IM. That also happen to be the key features that I myself need a lot. Connectivity for me is more important than carrying around documents, or being able to create and edit WORD and PPT files w
                • The size is the biggest disadvantage of the 9xxx Nokia's. The size and the build quality, they tend to break a lot and are expensive to get fixed. That's the reason I switched to a Clie TG50/T68i combo 15 months ago when my last 9210 failed.

                  I'm disappointed with the software (I had expected the Palm platform to do better) and the terrible keyboard of the Clie so that's why I'm considering going back to a Nokia (If I can extend the warranty).

                  My main applications are browsing (which is better on the Clie).
      • I'm a happy Treo 600 user too (got there from two generations of Nokia Communicators that were good, but the form factor killed it for me in the end).

        The 650 looks good, but there is speculation that the CF slot hasn't been re-designed from the 600 version, so it won't supply enough power to use the Palm WiFi card.

        That's a major bummer, as it would be a fantastic plus given home WiFi and the new facilities in pubs, shops, etc.

    • Re:Too little too late (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Fnkmaster ( 89084 ) on Sunday October 10, 2004 @03:28AM (#10484358)
      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.

    • I've read that the headers for the BT chip are on the board, but it's not included because Sprint doesn't like BT.
      • Ah, that is interesting. Didn't know that, but can imagine the Sprint Concerns, given the fact that Yahoo Groups (ahum) offers all kinds of needful software to help P900 users make ultimate use of the British Telecom wireless BT network in the UK.... Vodafone was pretty upset when the learned that they were sponsoring nice P900 handsets (through subscription) while most users made calls through 'alternative' channels available. British Telecom fixed the hack within the week or so.

  • iPalm? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Saturday October 09, 2004 @09:18PM (#10482882) Homepage Journal
    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? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by afidel ( 530433 )
      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

  • Treo 650 pics (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 09, 2004 @10:14PM (#10483159)
    Engadget has pics of the Sprint version of the Treo 650 here: http://www.engadget.com/entry/2487384516216828/ [engadget.com]
  • Sure, Palm One's Treo's are nice. But a lot of us don't want our cell phones built into our PDA's. And some of us in medical and security conscious fields can't bring cell phones into work environments. Unfortunately, it looks as though Palm One is putting all their development into Phones, at the expense of their PDA's.
    I had $400 bucks put aside to buy the new top of the line Palm PDA. I'd heard the T5 was about to be out, and was ready to buy it day one. Then I read the feature list and was shocked to find it has none of the new features I was looking for.
    It is a horribly disappointing device. It has no Wi-Fi, they've removed the voice recorder and vibrate alarm that was present in the T3, and they've made it out of plastic instead of the T3's metal housing. It has no camera, only a single memory slot, which means no place at all for an external memory card if a Wi-Fi card is installed.
    And that new multi-media version of Palm OS? The one based on BEOS? The one that was released to developers nearly a year ago? No it isn't present either. They're using the same old Palm OS that's on every other Palm device on the market.
    Sony is of course out of the Palm PDA market, but devices they released 8 months ago are still better than what was just announced by Palm. It's sad really, I don't want to buy a WinCE machine, but the only machines with big hi-res screens, built in Wi-Fi, removable batteries and featuring full multimedia support are WinCE.
    Message to Palm: Get off your butts, crash develop a feature laden, high end PDA (not cell phone) and release it in the next few months. Either that, or just cede the entire high end PDA market to the WinCE machines. Or hell, just license one of the many Taiwanese designed WinCE PDA's and drop PalmOS on it.
    • I'm not sure the last time you looked into what Palm is selling but I can't recognize the company from your description.

      They have at *least* 8 active models right now, only *one* of which integrates a cell phone.

      Their $149US model plays MP3s, Video, supports thousands of colours, uses SD cards of at least 256MB (I've read about people using 512MB and 1GB) with support for bluetooth and wifi ALSO with an SD card. The next model up gets you a 360x360 transflective screen, 65k colours and a built in VGA cam
  • If PalmOne can't even make built in wifi for it's newest pda (the tungsten t5), what makes people think that they'll have awsome cell phones?
  • 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 bui
    • Errr... Do you have a point? I mean, the Treo 300 is very old, I'm not sure how it's supposed to relate to this artical.
      • Their past product is kind of shoddy and I hope their new ones are better. Treo 300 isn't that old. It was still on the store shelves last I checked.
        • Have you missed all the reviews and generaly positive feedback about the Treo 600? I have one myself and it's a well-designed, reliable device. And the Treo 650 seems as if it will fix most of major complaints people have made about the 600.
    • When your Treo locks up, unscrew the stylus and hit the rest pin on the back. You might need to hold it for a bit, but this will cause a "hard" reboot.

      • Won't I lose everything with a hard reset? I mean I can always resync I guess.

        One time after losing everything I resynced and it actually deleted all my records. The last time I lost everything I backed up my palm desktop files and then did a resync.
        • Won't I lose everything with a hard reset? I mean I can always resync I guess.

          Maybe. The reset button has two modes--"soft reset", which just ends all processes and starts again, thus not killing your memory, and "hard reset", which clears the RAM and boots from ROM (thus losing any not-backed-up data.)

          Don't you lose everything if you let the battery run down? Or does your Treo have a flash memory backup?
    • 1. The battery is internal so it's not easily pulled/replace (see comment 2)

      True, although how often do you replace a battery?

      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.

      Unscrew the tip of your stylus and stick it in the hole in the back of the PDA marked reset. This will give you a soft reset. In o

    • I *am* a huge fan of my Treo 600:

      1) This is true, but I've never had a need to replace it yet, and I can get up to three days charge, and recharging is a snap.

      2) The 600 has a hardware reset switch that is located on the back of the phone, and is easily pressable with the pointer that screws out of the stylus. That being said, I've only had to use it twice since I've gotten the phone.

      3) Since I use Verizon, I can't really speak to that, but I get close to 50K/s at times, and the SMS and MMS work perf
  • I spent an hour searching on google a while ago and I cannot figure out how to enter text on a pocket pc? Does it have a grafitti system like a palm?

    And however the input works, how to people find PDA's compare in the realm of text input?

  • 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

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