More Details on the Treo 800

I hope I'm missing something really big here, like halographic 3D imaging, ESP, or a light sabre. Otherwise this thing looks like a base Treo shrank in all the wrong places. Palm is there a rabbit to pull out of this hat?

Pat Horne

-This thing's styling isn't THAT bad and has some nice contours going on at the sides and back panels. Offering it in, say, rubberized graphite or black would improve matters considerably. That'd I dislike anything in white other than dress shirts (especially electronics).

-Nice to see the fantastic 680 phone app making a return appearance after being inexplicably omitted from the 755p.

-The thinness is very nice indeed but the battery life worries me greatly. Really, I had no issues with the 700p/w thickness. I wish Palm had stuck with that formfactor and just gotten rid of the antenna.

Minuses:

-That shiny white plastic looks SLICK. I don't like slick handheld devices. Bring on the rubberized paint!

-In less than a year we've gone from fullsize SD (680) to miniSD (750 and 755p), back to fullsize SDHC plus CompactFlash (Fooleo) then to microSD (This 800 whatever).

Does Palm have ANY kind of clear-cut direction going forward?

For years ('01 to '06) you could at least count on SD support from Palm despite the myriad of bottom connectors, OS versions, stylus types etc.

All of this tomfoolery between SD/SDHC/miniSD/microSD shuffling will only confuse consumers, ensour retailers and reinforce the notion that Palm's product strategy is in disarray and lacks a cohesive unifying factors and formats.

-I'd personally rather have seen a 320x320 tiny Treo that jettisoned the QWERTY board in favor of a standard phone keyboard + onscreen Graffii. Of course that'd have required additional hacking at Garnet and likely broken compatibility between even more apps.

-I am stunned that IR is still around.

-Pat's right that they wasted too much LCD space around the border of the screen. I also think this one's a bit too "long" and the new hard button arrangement gobbles up more space than it should. I'd have preferred to see it a few mm wider instead of taller, thus giving it a slightly larger keyboard and screen.

Pilot 1000-->Pilot 5000-->PalmPilot Pro-->IIIe-->Vx-->m505-->T|T-->T|T2-->T|C-->T|T3-->T|T5-->TX-->Treo 700P

It doesn't look quite so ugly in this video as it does in the photos, but I still think it's actually a step back in looks compared to the 680/75x design. I'm with hkk: the colour needs to go. White is so bleh.

**Does Palm have ANY kind of clear-cut direction going forward?**
Only to be compared with "which stock will be best to buy in 2008?" or "Where's Osama". Who on earth could know? One thing seems sure. This is a company changing directions and not too concerned with it's customer base. I hate bringing this dead horse back again, but Apple did little more with iPhone than Palm could have by reading these boards in 2003.

Interesting idea about the T9 keyboard + grafitti. But, what baffles me about Palm is that they often do not build on the technology that they do release.

Why not roll out a T3/T|X+GSM/EDGE+WiFi connected PDA with an updated software suite, expansion,brushed up styling, and more robust browsing. Don't tell me that would not sell. Emphasize BT voice, but have rudimentary non-headset voice. All the tech, they already have. Just put in the bowl and stir! Little dev costs and an easy $400 in 2004.

Why not a Z33 as is with bundled MP3, 1,2,or4gb SD, & earbuds. Slap a little extra change on the MSRP and market to the school/college crowd. All the parts & tech has already been on Palm.com for years. Or, go upmarket with a similar device marketed with AD2P wireless MP3. Nobody is mass marketing that, and it could really steal a little iPod thunder. Palm could even make it look like wireless music is their invention. Apple has succeeded at that for years now.

Treo unlocked unbranded with Wifi + HVGA + Grafitti on Palm.com. The testing has been done on all the parts. Just put it together, box it, let the early adopters beta test as usual, and sell em' like crazy.

Or ...

the Gandolf fat candy bar with the SD card screen and no real SD. Whatever works.

Pat Horne

Treo unlocked unbranded with Wifi + HVGA + Grafitti on Palm.com. The testing has been done on all the parts. Just put it together, box it, let the early adopters beta test as usual, and sell em' like crazy.

What's the difference between first and third?

Why not a T|X with LED, vibra and voice memo, and people would have a reason to upgrade fom older models. Also business people and doctors would buy those instead of voice recorders.

Why not a thin upgrade from Treo 270/300, same form factor, and make it in both black and pink.

Why not a Foleo with a big CF card and bundled with all the available software, for education markets as a durable, cheaper laptop alternative.

Why not a free facelift for old Palm OS, high resolution icons and a modern stylish look, iPhoney shows that it's possible.

Plus, it is still thick compared to the Blackjack or Q, the screen looks TINY, the physical design looks cheap, the memory format would require me to buy new sticks. (which most likely wouldn't feature direct USB support - I use the SanDisk Ultra II Plus cards)

Handspring Visor, Palm V, Treo 180, Treo 90, Treo 600, Treo 650, Treo 700p
MTT

JD

Oh well- the 3D view looks a LITTLE more promising. At least they didn't stick the camera down in the middle of the device like they did on the 755 and others (lots of pictures of my fingers - thanks Palm!). Maybe after this phone gets pooped out, and the Fooleo sells to all the people who were pleased with the LifeDrive... Palm can finally get back to reality and figure out how to actually *improve* the Treo and maybe even work on PDAs some more. I'm guessing that the extra cash floating around isn't triggering the creative juices - they need more starving artists around their pretty Sunnyvale campus doing some real work.

Really Palm - people weren't clamoring in the streets for *less* battery life, *less* compatible flash formats, *less* screen size, *less* quality cameras, *less* internal memory.... The noble attempts at making stability improvements are finally paying off (years later), but you continue to turn around and muck with stuff that really doesn't need to be messed with. Here's one idea you can use to "compete" with those big boys: how about an LED "flash" with the camera so we can actually use it somewhere other than on the surface of the sun? It would seem to me that adding a "flash" would have been a much better use of your engineers' time rather than figuring out how to kill off battery life and make all your SD accessories unusable...

@Joad... how about, even before Palm adds a LED flash, they think about installing a camera that isn't completely horrible? Treos have some of the worst quality cameras ever installed in cell phones.

Lets face it, every phone competes with the Iphone... as well as the new Blackberries. This one looks to come up pretty short.

Handspring Visor, Palm V, Treo 180, Treo 90, Treo 600, Treo 650, Treo 700p
MTT

Well, I guess between this phone and stabbing oneself in the eye with a red hot soldering iron it's a pretty well-matched competition

Heck, if the price for one of those unlocked is REALLY reasonable, I could even see some Palm PDA faithful buying these to use as a thumboard-enabled PDA w/o even sticking a SIM card in it.

Pilot 1000-->Pilot 5000-->PalmPilot Pro-->IIIe-->Vx-->m505-->T|T-->T|T2-->T|C-->T|T3-->T|T5-->TX-->Treo 700P

Garnet, even in its current flaky incarnation, is fully capable of supporting comfortably-sized keyboards, larger 320x320 LCDs or 320x480, fullsize SDHC cards, and 2megapixel cameras w/ flash.

Palm's penny-pinching hardware design dept. would pretty much negate any advantages brought to the table by PLinux/Palm OS II. Off the top of my head, what could this little fellow improve upon Garnet by having a Linux-based OS? Rev. A or HSDPA/UMTS, & BT 2.0/A2DP would be the only major ones. 8gb+ file volumes would be another small improvemen t but since microSD is currently stuck at 2gb with 8gb + still on the distant horizon, that's not an issue at the moment.

No, Palm needs to debut POS II with a superb piece of hardware packing gigs of onboard flash storage, a 320x480 (or better) LCD, EVDO Rev. A, and a fantastic selection of bundled software Essentially, Palm's answer to the iPhone with all of the little touches that we like and expect from Palm.

Pilot 1000-->Pilot 5000-->PalmPilot Pro-->IIIe-->Vx-->m505-->T|T-->T|T2-->T|C-->T|T3-->T|T5-->TX-->Treo 700P

The real question here is whether or not the firmware denotation of Gnome means this thing is running the new Linux os?

I think...

not.

The etymology of "gnome" variously relates to "dwarf" (a small being that lives underground) and to "intelligence" (Greek: gnosis = knowledge). Might be a good code name for something newish and unannounced from Palm, but I wouldn't assume that it has anything to do with the Gnome desktop or GTK.

David Beers
Pikesoft Mobile Computing
www.pikesoft.com/blog

Spot on. It IS the hardware. We already know that Treos are capable. What we need now is fast & responsive, combined with THIN & good quality and hand feel.

Handspring Visor, Palm V, Treo 180, Treo 90, Treo 600, Treo 650, Treo 700p
MTT

Linux really makes a huge difference, and i dont think it is understood unless it is experienced. Nokia use *alot* of recourses on developing this maemo os (linux) and the N800 (for some reason, maybe they eventually will swap from symbian? I don't know, but it is a bit strange because the N800 cannot possibly be a commercial success compared to their phones).

Linux really makes a huge difference

I don't think the N800 would live up to Treo users expectations for responsiveness, though. Applications sometimes take a few seconds to launch and (most notable) deleting a bunch of emails can take many seconds. The only compensation is that you can jump to another application while the email client is hung up in delete-ville and get on with other tasks. That helps a lot for the kind of casual use that the N800 was designed for, but is still not going to be very satisfying to most Palm OS Treo users. There's still work to be done on mobile Linux, no question, and I'm glad that the folks at Palm are on it since whatever else you might say about the Palm OS it has always been the gold standard for snappy user interface.

David Beers
Pikesoft Mobile Computing
www.pikesoft.com/blog

Well, at least it's a confirmed PALM device!

I wonder what reason they used with YouTube for taking it down? We've read that the WM 6 "leak" was removed from the archive site due to "patent violation" (!) but how can one justify taking down a video of a device - I'd think that would fall WELL under "standard journalism"? Maybe they're calling it "trade secret revelation" or some such?

W.r.t. those "blurry" photos et al, however, there used to be crisp "leaked" photos of TREOs around the 'Net that had tiny little black marks spaced around the edge of the screen....some type of encoding of a unique ID?...makes sense to blur thigns up in such a case.

Speaking of photos, I see PiC has removed the photos of the device as well so PiC knows The Reason PALM uses...

-- http://www.engadget.com/2007/08/05/more-blurry-pictures-of-the-palm-gandolf-the-treo-800-series/

That is, the number of physical differences suggest the underlying hardware is totally laid out differently, thus "same" might be stretching it.

An interesting detail is that the N800 is made in good old Finland and not in Hungary or China or Taiwan etc. It's almost like i get the feeling that Nokia is doing this (making open source maemo and internet tablets) simply because they *can* and *want* and think it is great *fun* and a good way of spending money for the *undisputed king of mobile phones*. On the other hand, it's been years since i have had so much fun with a device, simply because it is a fun device to play with and is on in less than a second. My laptop is off at the moment, and this is happening more often for each day. This makes me think of the Foleo and the fact that it will inherit the same basic properties as the N800, only better to write on.

Since the Treo 800 series is based on HTC Iris... hopefully there's also... Wi-Fi.

David Beers
Pikesoft Mobile Computing
www.pikesoft.com/blog

Only in the Treo's case, the user could "BYOW" (bring your own wireless) by way of a shortie formfactor wi-fi SDIO or miniSDIO card. Assuming FrankenGarnet/POS II drivers were available, it'd be a pretty decent solution without upsetting the carriers. Let individual end users deal with inevitable tradeoff in batterylife & signal strength and shoulder any support/driver issues.

And for folks like myself who don't care too much about wi-fi if there's a good EVDO signal nearby....well let an 8gb SDHC card reside in that slot for a buncha internal storage. It'd really mitigate having a mini or microSD slot in the more accessible side-mounted location!

Pilot 1000-->Pilot 5000-->PalmPilot Pro-->IIIe-->Vx-->m505-->T|T-->T|T2-->T|C-->T|T3-->T|T5-->TX-->Treo 700P

I wouldn't even object to Palm selling Treos where the *only* SD expansion was behind the battery cover, as long as there were drivers so it could operate as a flash-drive when attached to my PC. I never was keen on open card slots or the flimsy attempts by device makers to cover them.

David Beers
Pikesoft Mobile Computing
www.pikesoft.com/blog