Comments on: Rumor: Pictures and Details of Palm's Upcoming Smartphone

Ken

Hmmmm....
sundance

Oh well, better luck next time...

p.s. i personaly preffer having two different devices ... one palm and one cellphone ...

Interfacing with Exchange is indeed hard. If you are stuck with Exchange, my condolences--you have a white elephant and you are paying dearly for it, whether you know it or not. One of the indications of that is the fact that you think that a handheld needs to do something extra-special to talk to your mailer.

Unlike interfacing with a proprietary PC program like Exchange, interfacing with a real standards-compliant enterprise mail server is not a hard problem.

Does one of your sources still stands with the info that maybe "every Palm would have integrated Bluetooth" in the future Ed?

A (GPRS-)Bluetooth-802.11 dual mode would be THE solution imho. Companies like Silicon Wave/Intersil (Blue802), Mobilian and others are working on it.

The sooner the better.

I don't think this was the model that Sony designers helped work on. I believe it was the new ARM/OS5 Palm that you're referring to.

Second comment:
> The whole Sony designer thing is absolute FUD.

Uhm.. can you clarify? How could references to Sony designers who helped work on a Palm model be considered FUD?

Do you even know what FUD is?

Jim

IT'S A PHONEY

Now that's funny. "Heavy stone" might also be translated as "brick." :)

Scott

TSC

The Kyocera is a Palm device made by a phone company, whereas this is a phone made by a Palm company. This will show through in the end, I think.

Now if you go to T-Mobile you can pay $400 for the same phone.
---

Sir Tez

Sir Tez
IT is a rough life

---
Sir-Tez

Sir Tez
IT is a rough life

I hate fat phones and this has a bigger waist line than the TREO. I think TREO is the maximum I can carry and this thing, I don't care what pad it has, is not going to be hot PERIOD

Sony, please don't make this mistake and give me a good PDA to go with my T68i.

I'm with you though, I'll probably stick with an excellent PDA connected to an excellent phone via Bluetooth. Let's you have all the best in both worlds.

The Treo is first and foremost a CELLPHONE with data capability. Clam shell design, ability to put it up to your ear and talk, and relatively small form factor to appeal to cellphone users that might want PDA functionality.

The Tungsten is designed to be a PDA with wireless data access, and oh yeah, it also does calling with an earpiece (much like the new RIM Blackberry device - except in colour, with more expandability, blah, blah, blah).

I am still leaning towards the Kyocera 7135, regardless of the lack of "full" keyboard - YVMV.

I highly doubt that Handspring and Palm will sue each other...it's possible that Handspring and Palm collaborated on some of the design specs....and borrowed heavily from each other.

Please continue your discussion of it there.

p.s. The earlier comment wasn't deleted; it was moved to an article where it was on topic.

----
News Editor

Given that the FCC approval process for wirless information device takes a long time, it's plausible, indeed very probable, that the development of this product began before the appropriate availability of OS5.

---
News Editor

It's like the CE and UL ratings for electrical devices....get one and the other is easy to get.

It seems like every device that comes out is missing one of my necessary features:

-Bluetooth or GPRS
-Hi-Res
-Integrated thumb-board (or soft graffiti)
-OS 5

The Tungsten T leaves out the thumb-board/SOFT graffiti, and the W leaves out OS 5!

====
Boze
====

Agreed. While the phone part of whatever phone/PDA I'll end up buying is the least important part of the device for me, I do want it to be reasonably usable. The whole point of a device like this is for it to be one-piece. Don't need to mess with separate pieces (e.g. cell phone + PDA), cables, etc. Requiring a headset means you do have to mess with two separate pieces and a tangly cable between them. Yuck. I'd be okay with a required headset only if it were integrated into the unit and were on a retracting (and internally swallowed-up) cable.

"(isn't Blackberry coming out with one that has a mic and speaker, thus realizing their initial mistake?)"

Yeah, I believe that's right. The current GPRS version (the 5810) requires a headset, but the new iDEN model appears to have a mic and speaker.

Hopefully the Tungsten is exactly what you want and you'll love it! But making a blanket declaration that it is the winner is a rather self-centric view of the world. The winner will be the one that sells the most units (or simply stays in business!).

Remember, it's a true clamsell design, and when closed it is thicker than the Treo... but when opened it's actually thinner (much like the Sony NR70).

But more important than thickness is width... and the 7135 is one of the narrowest Palm OS devices ever released. It's over a half inch narrower than my Palm Vx, which makes it quite comfortable to hold.

Anyhow, I see that I'm the minority. Oh well. I still say the Tungsten W looks fine and has exactly what I need. Palm has nailed at least one customer, here.

-------
James Sorenson

All I wanted to show - as of my own experiences - is, that none of the actual available devices (neither the treo nor the here per rumor introduced palm model) have the required technologie build in there devices.
Therefore it'ts better to have a slim bluetooth palm together with a mobile-phone whichs adds the latest technologie than a bulky all in one modell where the communication technologie can't be changend.

GPRS / WAP
----------

This is the name how GPRS was introduced in Switzerland and other european countries. Up to this moment mobile phone users could download wap-pages (Wireless Application Protocol a sort of reduced web-pags for mobile phones) at about 1000 bytes per page with regular gsm data-communication method and connection speed of about 9600 bps. You had to pay the mentioned USD 0.14 per minute or sometimes the same price as for a speech-connection (which usually was much more). WAP therefore wasn't used very much.

With the introduction of GPRS (with the above mentioned price sheme) mobile-phone-providers wanted to give the abillity to download the small wap-pages at about USD 0.013 per page (1000 bytes per page). This make's it a good deal for palm-pqa's too. (you dan for ex. use a wap-email-client to read your emails in pieces of 1000 bytes and decide if you want to read the rest in the office or at home).

But with this gprs-price-modell you clearly go cheaper for every downloaded real web-page with the regular gsm-data connection (at 9600 bps) and the cost of USD 0.14 per connection minute. No one will use gprs for downloading palm apps (like it's possible with xiino) oder web-pages (using for ex. avantgo, xiino or handsprings web-browser for the palm). Each webpage uses much more bytes than a wap page. You can do that with your treo or the here mentioned tungsteen w. But you could do that for years this way.

HSCSD
-----

Having a model with build in hscsd (high speed circuit switched data) would allow you to get 2 times (ericsson) or 3 times of data for the same minute price.

As there is no palm-os modell available with this build in technologie, you could still get a pc-card-type II adapter put in on the back of your sony t-series or palm m5xx-series palm and buy a pc-card like the nokia-pc-card with hscsd. But probably this card doesn't know the stand-by mode of the palm. Letting you not beeing continuosly beeing online with gprs. I is rather probably that this combination will drain your batteries much more than any other solution.

As gprs is no real solution for real web-browsing or other more professional applications (it is mainly for wap-browsing or using palm pqa's consuming not too much bytes with the current price modells) as it was introduced in switzerland and other european countries, I suggest you get a palm model with build in bluetooth and combine with a mobile phone with the latest technologie build in. Anyway if you don't itend to buy a new palm every 6 month's or so, how will you keep pace with the change's on the mobile-market. As newer and cheaper technologies arise, with much higher data-transmission-speeds you are on the save side having the possibillity to connect via bluetooth to the latest cellphone. I your cellphone resides in your suit- or trousers-pocket or in your suitcase. Who will say if you have build in wireless technologie or not.

GPRS in Europe is no real solution for mobile professionals which download the usual amount of data as you use when you surf on websites, not with the current price model. The higher data-transmission-speed is of no big use. As you will have to use the usual gsm transmission speed of 9600 bps and regular gsm-data-connections to get the cheaper connections for the usual data.

You forgot to mention in which country you live and even more important what you pay for your gprs data connections.

In Switzerland you pay for 1 minute 4 channel hscsd at about 200000 downloaded bytes USD 0.14. Download the same data with gprs and you will pay USD 2.60 !! (USD 1.30, if you have already downloaded 1 MB within the same month. This might get you a really expensive hobby to use gprs as a mobile professional.

By the way, like I mentioned before, swisscom, the biggest mobile-provider of switzerland is suggesting to their customers to use hscsd for larger data. Because the data connection has a higher quality. I've been sitting in the train coming home from work (zürich to basel) and a lot of people were talking to there spouses using their cellular phones. No gprs connection was possible (in fact I was connected but I could download at all). But regular data connections with or without hscsd worked fine. Imagine you download a big webpage (usual webpages easily take more than 60000 bytes) or a avango channel and you will have to start again after half of download has been completet?
The swisscom-spokesperson clearly said, neither is the gprs connections-speed quaranteed nor is guaranteed, that the connection persists. For that reason they suggest to use regular gsm-data-connections with hscsd for these purposes (I should mention here that swisscom's service is very good. This employee called me on my own cellular phone and answerd my questions during 1 hour!).

Christian Stocker, c.stocker32@bluewin.ch

You sure about that? It was my understanding that only so-called "class A" GSM/GPRS devices support simultaneous voice and data, and currently no such devices exist.

"Class A phones can make full use of NOM 1 networks: they can use circuit-switched voice and GPRS data services at the same time. Class B phones can register circuit-switched voice and packet-switched data services at the same time but may only use one at a time. Should the user receive a call while on the internet, they can take the call and GPRS service will be suspended, resuming once the voice call is ended. Resuming GPRS service is much faster than re-establishing a data call. Class C phones can only register for packet-switched data or for circuit-switched voice services; if the user chooses GPRS, then they will be totally unavailable for GSM calls and reciprocally."

So you are indeed correct that you can receive incoming calls while using GPRS as long as your phone is class B or better. With class A you could actually have your data continue in the background while you were on your call.

I read on another page (can't give you the URL as that IE window has frozen) that SMS can be received during GPRS usage even on class C phones.

Anyway, I believe that _all_ CDMA 2000 1xRTT devices are the equivalent of class C GSM/GPRS devices, so that's a nice advantage of GPRS to know about. I believe this is supposed to be fixed in followups to 1xRTT.

No, I don't believe that's true. Do you have a reference for that? I understand the Treo's GPRS implementation to be a class B device -- that is, you can receive notification of an incoming voice call while using GPRS data, but to answer that call you must suspend your data transmission. You can't do both at the same time.

FWIW, I'm currently using a m515, Ericsson T39 and a Bluetooth headset - it all works quite nicely together. So I'll probably go for the model T instead (does it come in black?!)

I got my BT headset from here (Australian site): http://www.pocketscience.com.au/bluetooth.asp