Competitive Intelligence

PalmOne Finally Gets It Right: The New Treo 650

After spending most of October OTR (on the road) – feeling guilty for not having updated my Weblog much over the past few weeks, despite having been given ample opportunity to do so during flyover, I thought I'd at least make mention of some of the more significant October events in business and competition – here's my top 12 list:

1. Merck's Vioxx Withdrawal
   
2. Orbitz Acquisition by Cendant
   
3. Virgin Galactic & The X-Prize
   
4. Chiron's Flu Vaccine Debacle
   
5. Fannie Mae's Financial Shenanigans
   
6. Sun Almost Losing Java to Kodak
   
7. Howard Stern Casting Lot with Sirius
   
8. Britney Spears Becoming Britney Federline
   
9. Marsh & McLennan versus Eliot Spitzer
   
10. Sinclair Broadcasting's Cave to Investor Pressure
    
11. Wisconsin's Unreal Football Win Over Purdue
    
12. Boston Red Sox Finally Winning the World Series

Alongside this, I thought I’d leave October behind by blogging the most personally stand-out and interesting event of the month for me – palmOne’s launch of the Treo 650 last week in San Francisco... FINALLY!

After arriving for my second trip to the West Coast this month (Palm Springs last week for Frost & Sullivan) on Sunday 24 October, I checked in at the KMWorld 2004 conference in Santa Clara, gave my pre-conference half-day workshop on CI software applications and connected with friends Steve Barth and Madan Rao to journey in my spaciously appointed Dodge Magnum rental up to the Hilton in San Francisco where Steve slipped us into the press event before the week’s Moscone-HQ’d CTIA Wireless exhibition. (While the Magnum rode nicely, I can’t recommend it for the tight switchbacks and bottoming-out hills and valleys of downtown SF, plus the turning radius is awful… but I digress…)

We got checked into CTIA’s Oktoberfest-themed event – replete with free beer and cheese and sausages – and proceeded to gorge ourselves on equal helpings of German-inspired stand-up cuisine alongside all the wireless hi-tech – software, services, hardware offered up by the titans of the industry across at least 25 demo booths. Besides all the cool GPS and Bluetooth apps, without a doubt the show-stealer was the Treo 650 – available on the Sprint network in November and elsewhere presumably later on.

I have to say that, after my pan of the Treo 600 almost a year ago, the 650 fixes virtually all of the most important shortcomings the 600 suffered from – most notably, the replaceable battery problem, which was explained to me as stemming in the earlier model from the lack of uninterruptible, nonvolatile memory… i.e., if the battery was swapped, the handset would lose all of its data and configs and reset back to factory default… which, in hindsight, makes sense. Plus, they added Bluetooth and a mega-pixel digital camera with video capture that, side-by-side with the 600, is vastly superior and with image quality high enough that the average snapshot-taker could discard a separate camera entirely depending only on this. While I’ve heard the biggest problem with the 600 had been the clarity and reception quality of the phone’s voice-calling itself, and I haven’t had the opportunity to try that out in the 650, but if they’ve pulled off the functional part of the equation, then I’ll be looking forward to getting one myself, although I might wait for AT&T Wireless to be somewhat better digested by Cingular before placing my network bets. Here’s a longer and better review from PC Magazine:

Because the 600 was such a hit, palmOne has been understandably conservative with the new Treo. Although the Treo 650 looks the same, feels pretty much the same, and runs the same programs as the 600, we think it's a worthy upgrade.

Most notably, palmOne has boosted the Treo's screen resolution from 160 by 160 to 320 by 320. The company also added quad-band support and EDGE high-speed data capability to the GSM version, bumped processor speed up to 312 MHz, incorporated Bluetooth for wireless headsets and HotSyncing, slightly enlarged the keyboard and backlit it, and made the rechargeable battery removable.

EDGE support—which doubles the data speed of the previous GPRS version—and the high-res screen will make this model an even more compelling e-mail and Web browsing device. The Treo 650 will come with Exchange ActiveSync to hook up to Exchange 2003 servers and DataViz Documents To Go 7, an application for reading Microsoft Office documents—and the best document reader for any handheld.

There's no WiFi—this isn't the HP iPAQ h6315, the networking jack-of-all-trades handheld. But if you get a version that runs on AT&T's EDGE network, you may not miss WiFi on such a small device. The Treo 650 runs Palm OS 5.4, not the upcoming Cobalt OS. We're not expecting to see any Cobalt devices until 2005.
We got to play around with a unit a few weeks back and loved what we saw. We can't wait to get a Treo 650 into PC Labs to test. Until then, we'll give a cautious thumbs-up to this definite step forward for Palm smart phones.

While I can’t turn back the clock on October (cue vague daylight savings time reference), here’s hoping November proves an altogether more consistently bloggable month... at least for me. The Treo’s back on everybody’s wish list; only this time, deservedly so.

- Arik