Conventional Palm PDAs have incorporated a 3.5mm stereo headphone jack ever since the days of the Tungsten T in 2002. Yet Palm’s Treo line has soldered along unchanged with its 2.5mm headset plug dating back to the earliest days of the Treo 180. Treo users desiring high-quality stereo sound are still saddled with using a bulky 2.5mm to 3.5mm headphone adapter or buying pricey, often underwhelming stereo headphone/microphone combo units. TCL has modified the original Labtec design to include a Palm MultiConnector (“Athena”) connector. Read on to hear how it does in my review.

Phone Technician, has received another series of updates and fixes. This handy piece of software from Hobbyist Software is now up to version 2.87. Check out the PIC review here. All Treos aside from the 700p receive additional bugfixes related to the LED functionality in this update. Other utlities from Hobbyist Software, Snoozy, Showoff, and Butler have also received minor updates in the past week or so.

Today at Palm Inc's Analyst Day, Palm CEO Ed Colligan officially announced that Palm will deliver a new Linux and open source based mobile computing platform combined with Palm OS Garnet technology on new products later this year. The new platform was just announced at the Palm Analyst meeting and details are light at this point and still coming in. Read on for some slides and more information from the presentation.

The platform is described as a "new foundation for Palm." It will combine aspects of Palm OS Garnet and a Linux core. Palm plans to "evolve" the Palm Developer community to the new platform.

Rumor: Information regarding both the EOL date of the current Treo 700p and the possible launch date of the rumored Treo 755p has been leaked by way of an internal Sprint document posted to the SprintUsers forums. The list gives a number of current and upcoming handset dates. Of interest to Palm fans is the fact that the EOL date of the 700p has been changed from the "early May" of the previous leaked info to "mid May". This revised date could be in order to accomodate another delay in the testing and rollout of the long-awaited 700p ROM update.

The rumored Treo 755p, has now received a revised release date of May 14th. Curiously, this info sheet still has this Treo's early codename of "Sherlock" attached. This info matches up with all of the earlier reports giving it a release date in the mid-May to early June timeframe.

In a new interview with Bloomberg, Palm CEO Ed Colligan has again downplayed the prospect of a takeover bid and said that the company is focused on being a successful stand-alone business.

"What we are focused on today is making sure this business is as successful as possible as a stand-alone business," said Colligan. "When you're a public company, there are always people who may or may not be interested in any point of time of owning that asset. We don't control that. If that happens, it happens."

The article also delves into Palm's plans to standardize its Treo production, in order to accelerate the development of new devices and cut costs. Potentially, says Colligan, this could slash development times from two years to nine months. He says new devices built using this method will appear this year, almost certainly referring to the rumoured Treo 755p.

MobilitySite confirms the news this morning that the final remaining Dell PDA model, the Axim x51, has been discontinued. Indeed, the x51 appears to be no longer available for ordering from Dell's web site or telephone sales department.

The Axim x51 line had been Dell's flagship handheld line as well as its most recently released model. The x51 was introduced in the fall fall 2005 (around the same time as Palm's TX) and is fully spec'd out with such high-end features as dual expansion slots, wi-fi & Bluetooth wireless, and accelerated ATI graphics.

If the report is indeed accurate, the this latest casualty would leave only Palm, HP, and a handful of smaller and/or lesser-known firms maintaining production of traditional PDA models.

Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine has posted the transcript of an interview with Tara Griffin, Palm's Vice President of Enterprise Markets. The focus of the interview is on Palm's diffferentiating strategy for its Windows Mobile-based Treos going forward and also how the fiercely loyal Palm OS user base responded to the transition.

Unsurprisingly, delicate questions such as the possibility of Palm releasing a non-touchscreen-equipped WM Smartphpone Edtion Treo and Windows Mobile being Palm's OS of choice moving forward are sidestepped. Nevertheless, the interview is worth reading for no reason other than Palm is still (officially) not knocking OS Garnet and being diplomatic when discussing the strengths of both of their OSes. Also, it's refreshing to see Ed Colligan's mantra of "delight the customer" still in use and being spread to all levels of Palm corporate HQ.

For those readers tired of hearing only Treo-centric news, a nice editorial piece on 1src brings us back to those heady days of 2003 and 2005. ...the era when pocket-swelling "multimedia" PDAs reigned supreme! Namely, Palm's LifeDrive and Sony's NZ90. These two infamous models were two of the bulkiest, most power-hungry devices ever to run the Palm OS and generally considered enormous disasters by both critics and casual handheld users alike.

Alan's piece does a good job of listing the numerous shortcomings of both devices, especially the always contentious point about available RAM (only a 32mb SDRAM chip atop a slow 4gb Microdrive on the LifeDrive and a mere ~11mb free on the Clie) how a high MSRP was the final deathblow to both of those already severaly compromised handhelds. While Alan claims hindsight is 20/20, many users (especially in the case of the LifeDrive-this author and former LifeDrive owner included) thought the LifeDrive a superb concept that was hobbled by Palm's stingy RAM allocation and the presence of a mechanical microdrive. And Sony's clamshell Clie line could be a very early preview of what many are expecting next from Jeff Hawkins and Palm in regards to the mythical "Foleo" product; quite possibly a "FOLding TrEO".

Pocket PC Central has posted a nice how-to guide on how to add wi-fi to the Treo 750. The whole process is fairly easy and is explained clearly and with plenty of screenshots.

First and foremost, the only Treo 750-compatible miniSDIO wi-fi card currently on the market is the Spectec SDW-822. Cautious types who use their devices on the Cingular/AT&T GSM network should also be warned that a small modification will have to be made to their devices' Windows Mobile registry in order to bypass the Cingular proxy.

Opera Software today announced that it has signed an agreement with Palm, to deliver its Opera 9 Web browser to Palm for use in upcoming products. Opera receives a development fee, license fees and support and maintenance fees under the agreement to provide full Web browsing to Palm.

The Opera 9 rendering engine is used in a number of products on the market today including the Nokia N800 and Nintendo Wii. Opera Mini, a separate mobile browser and service, is already available for Palm OS devices and requires the Java VM to run.

In this round of quickie Palm OS news updates we take a look at the 8K recently filed by Palm, which contains the contract for the recent Palm OS Garnet licensing deal, Palm has updated their mobile portal site, TreoTwit is a new freeware app that lets you post to the Twitter service from your Treo, and we look at a couple of new software apps and updates.