Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Even though the official announcement of the Treo is less than two days away, there continue to be leakes uncovered at Treonauts. The latest is a Treo 650 Specification page which confirms a bunch of things we’ve already heard but doesn’t introduce anything new and doesn’t answer all the questions out there. For one, we still don’t know if the SD slot will be fully SDIO compliant so that Wifi or GPS SD cards might work in the 650. However, there is the following:

Multi-connector for add-on peripherals: Yes

What I believe this refers to is the new type of connector that allows PalmOS devices to connect to hotsynch cables and chargers, and some peripherals like external keyboards. Theoretically this means that the Treo could connect to a peripheral that would provide wifi or GPS, but through this connector instead of the SD slot. I’m not sure if this is an advantage, but my hunch is it wouldn’t be because it means manufacturers can’t take devices that have already been built for PDA’s that have the proper SDIO slot and all they have to do to make it work for the 650 would be to create a new softare driver, or maybe just alter one for a similar device.

The other item that Andrew over at Treonauts mentions is the memory, which is specified at only 22MB. He brings up a valid point about how memory prices have dropped. One can now easily find 1GB of solid state memory for under $100. While the memory that’s used inside a Treo may have to be a lot faster than that in a memory card, it still seems crazy to have such an advanced phone in so many other ways but still sporting an amount of on-board memory that was common two or three years ago. It’s not just a matter of cost, it’s a matter of all the memory-intensive applications for Palm devices. One can use a memory manager program so that you can put a lot of them on an external memory card, but this slows the operation of these programs down significantly. It’s one thing if this was a feature of the Treo that you could upgrade, but to my knowledge internal memory has never been upgradeable in any PalmOS device. So we are forced to live with this weakness until the next Treo comes out.

In any case, I’m sure this will not prevent me, not most of the others out there that have been waiting anxiously for the release to not buy it. I still can’t wait for the announcement on Monday and I will try to post links to it and any other articles as soon as I can.