Palm yesterday officially announced its new Treo, the Treo Pro. Gizmodo has a quick hands-on, and various sites are making the inevitable comparison with the new trend setter in smartphones. In this case the comparison to the well-hyped iPhone may be a fair one given that Palm now has Jon Rubinstein, formerly one of the wizzes behind Apple’s iPod line, as its new chief of product development. Based on the pictures released of it, the Treo Pro does appear to draw some inspiration in its design from the iPhone, whether that was intended or not. It is thinner and glossier on its face than previous Treos.
Interestingly enough, some of the criticism the Treo Pro is drawing is based on its still very old-Treo-like 320×320 screen in comparisons to the iPhone’s fairly generous 480×320. The irony here is that Palm has had devices with 480×320 resolution screens for almost 5 years starting with the Tungsten T3, circa 2003. Treos, due to their need for space to accommodate a mini-keyboard, have stuck to no more than 320×320. Heck, I owned one of those 480×320 devices, the much-maligned (but in my experience very capable) LifeDrive, circa 2005.
In hindsight, if Palm had found a way to merge some of the capabilities of the LifeDrive (large storage of 4GB or more, 480×320 wide screen, WiFi) with the smartphone features of the Treo line, it could have had a winner that might have kept it going stronger into the storm that has been the iPhone and the other smartphones from HTC and RIM that have eclipsed Palm’s Treos in the past few years. Old OS or no, Palm’s devices maintained a lot of usefulness and ease-of-use for quite some time, even still today in many cases. Windows Mobile, besides being shinier and having more in the way of “modern” features now than Palm OS Garnet, is really no better in usability. It wasn’t really until the iPhone showed a new way to do things that Palm OS (and Windows Mobile, for that matter) began to look truly outdated.
But that’s just my opinion. Maybe Palm’s rumored new “Nova” devices will make good on some of what Palm has been sitting on these past few years.
srhawk.com 