Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Over at Treonauts, there’s been a new sighting of the upcoming Treo 650, this time by someone who replaced the “600” in an address on PalmOne’s website with “650” and came up with a page that is “waiting in the wings” so to speak for when the Treo 650 has been released – currently rumored to be on October 25. The image shows three different Treo 650 models, guessed to be basically the same model but just branded to different carriers (with of course the requisite GSM or CDMA receiver depending on the carrier’s system). I’ve gone ahead and enlarged the part of the image with the Treo 650’s and sharpened it a bit in Photoshop to produce the image you see here.

According to Treonauts, the one on the right has a generic “PalmOne” branding, the one in the middle is Sprint, and the one on the left is not known. I can kind of make out the Sprint branding, but not the PalmOne. This brings me to another question about the roll-out. We don’t know when the new Treo will be coming out, all we have so far is the aforementioned announcement. Even if the new Treo is available within a week of the announcement, will it be available for all carriers? When the Treo 600 was released around a year ago, it was first available only as a CDMA Sprint-branded model, only later coming out for AT&T as a GSM-branded model which was subsequently unlocked to provide the phone for other GSM carriers like Cingular, T-Mobile, Orange, etc. I’m hopeful that whatever agreements PalmOne had with Sprint for them to have an exclusive hold on the device’s branding for a while will not be the case this time. Now that the Treo 600 is available branded to all major U.S. carriers (save Nextel), and has been a top seller for all of these (perhaps Verizon may be an exception here since it’s only been available through them since July) I think it would be a bit odd to give only one carrier dibs, if even for a month. I think it would mean that carier would have to funnel a whole lot of cash to PalmOne. And while we now have number portability, I find it hard to fathom switching providers just for this device a month earlier, especially if that means going grom a GSM carrier to a CDMA carrier…