Twelve Black Code Monkeys

It looks like the Treo 650 may soon be available to most of the world. For the last couple of months, it’s been exclusively available in one country (the U.S.) from one provider (Sprint) using a radio protocol (CDMA) that is incompatible with 99% of what the rest of the world uses (GSM). Last week we heard some rumors that Cingular (which uses GSM) would soon be carrying the long-awaited follow-up to the popular Treo 600. Today there is word that Pa1mOne has put up a page about a GSM Treo 600 without specifying a specific carrier, and writing that it is “coming”. This is good news for most smartphone enthusiasts who have been thinking of buying the Treo 650 because what this is saying basically is that Pa1mOne should be at least selling through their own site an unlocked GSM version of the phone which anyone who’s carrier uses GSM (most of the world outside the U.S. does, as well as T-Mobile and Cingular/AT&T within the U.S.) should be able to use without any problem. Just swap out your SIM card and plug it in and it should work immediately.

For some reason Pa1mOne has decided to remove the picture they put up, so it now links to a generic page, but Treonauts has a screen capture. Seems similar to another snafu that they made and then retracted later which leads me to think that either they aren’t communicating very well with their web team or else this is yet another stealth marketing move to create more buzz amongst the fanatics!

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Ok, guys, you were able to do the “impossible” and set up a way to receive wifi on the Treo 650. My big question now is, if this was possible, why not memory? The other big complaint we’ve had as far as the Treo 650 is concerned is it’s lack of additional memory and the fact that the new file system has actually made it so that the effective amount of memory has DECREASED. I’m no hacker or electrical engineer, so I have no idea how difficult this is, but what about hacking the Treo 650 and seeing if we can add a bunch more memory to the thing? Granted, this might be a job only for those fairly experienced with a soldering iron, but just the ability to do this would give people hope. And just think at the enterprising folk who could take the information provided and develop a business plan around it! So, what do you think? Can it be done? How hard would it be?

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The tech blogs and Treo sites are abuzz today with the news from a TreoCentral member Shadowmite (the same guy who was able to defeat the Sprint Bluetooth crippling) that he had been able to create a firmware hack (hosted here) on the Treo 650 that would allow Pa1mOne’s Wifi card to work. The hack is still in “beta’ if that term can even refer to a hack! The one problem is that in order to have both wifi capability as well as Sprint’s “Vision” 2.5G data network, you need to do a hard reset during the install process, which will wipe all your data. This may not be a big deal for many for the reward of Wifi, and it also may just be a temporary hurdle. Now that the hack exists, it seems that third party companies may indeed take the initiative in developing a wifi card with drivers that will work on the 650 and maybe the 600 as well. The one issue remains that the added drain from the card may make the battery life of the Treo run out much faster than normal, so manufacturers may have to develop some kind of onboard battery for the wifi card, or users may just have to invest in additional batteries for the 650 (or external batteries for the 600).

When I started using the Treo 600 back in June, it was as a trial. A friend of mine had bought it several months earlier and was using it on his AT&T account, but he had recently switched to Verizon because of their better reception. I borrowed it from him to see if I could get it to work on my T-Mobile account. After doing lots of searching and playing around with it, I finally got it to work, but it was not easy.

As I talked about in my post yesterday, because smartphones are inherently tied up in the mobile phone industry, the carrier companies have a huge influence over the phone manufacturers. These companies don’t want to make it easy for me to take my phone from one carrier to another. AT&T was notorious for locking phones and not allowing their unlocking for any reason, which kind of defeats part of the purpose of having a GSM phone. T-Mobile is a little bit better in that they let you unlock your phone usually after a short length of time as long as your account is in good standing. Cingular has historically been the best about unlocking, but now that they have merged with AT&T, I don’t know if these policies will change. Of course you can usually find a completely unlocked GSM phone to work on your given network, but it will come at a premium. And CDMA users are pretty much SOL because they have no interchangeable SIM card.

No doubt, Pa1mOne was pressured by one or more of these companies to not provide wifi drivers for the Treo 600 or 650, and they complied. While this makes a lot of people angry at Pa1mOne, which I’m sure is at least somewhat justified, they are simply complying with the realities of the business. If they were to anger the providers, those providers might just decide not to offer the phone and then Pa1mOne would be giving up huge amounts of potential revenue. So while I too am angry that Pa1mOne did not have the guts to stand up to these companies, I can’t really be too angry, because doing so would be extremely risky for them. With the carriers merging and thus gaining even more power to influence phone manufacturers (who are not merging at all, as far as I can tell!), the situation does not look that promising until manufacturers can gain some kind of strategic advantage that allows them not to be pushed around as much by the carriers.

Thanks to Shadowmite and those who helped him, we may have a hack that will give us the ability to do wifi that should have been included to begin with, despite what the carriers might want.

Link, link, link

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Last week I wrote about the Treo 650 Memory Debacle and wanted to post some further thoughts. Andrew over at Treonaughts has been getting indignant about the issue, as have many of his readers and those on Treocentral and myTreo.net. Palm came out with a response later last week which basically said that they were offering those who needed it 128MB SD cards and would work on a fix that would be available as a system software update. Fair enough, right? Maybe.

Part of the curse of being a “power user” or “early adopter” is that you tend to be in a relatively small demographic. As such, you are usually a minority and so you are marginalized to some degree. We can make a lot of noise which can sometimes cause companies to sit up and take notice, since we can detect problems much sooner than the average user, but the responses from companies, when they come at all, are normally just damage control PR that tries to show they are being responsive and to sooth the worries of less-savvy users who learn about these issues.

PalmOne, as other companies before it, I’m sure, understands that the big stink that a lot of people have made about the Treo 650’s memory issues, is lost on the majority of its target market. What is it’s target market? It’s increasingly corporate users. I’m sure PalmOne is looking to supplant Blackberry with the 650, or at least eat up a chunk of its sizable corporate market share. While corporate users are also a savvy bunch, chances are they will be using the Treo primarily for contact management, phone calls, and scheduling, all of which are built into the Treo. Yes, the memory issue will mean that they won’t be able to store as many contacts, emails, etc., but these types of data generally don’t take up much room and they could easily and cheaply expand their capacity with an external memory card.

Meanwhile, us “power users” who want to use the Treo 650 to its fullest potential, like the Treo 600 – as a CONVERGENCE device – are out in the cold. The Treo 600 serves as my email reader, phone, contact manager, scheduler, but also GPS, audio player web browser, RSS reader, gameboy, nutrition tracker, and much more. What gets me is that at least in this area we will actually be getting LESS with an upgrade to the 650. Memory is such a core feature of any computer or PDA because it is what lets you run programs and store data, that it just is unbelievable to me why a company would want to keep it at the minimum that allows for just the basic applications to run. Some of suggested that PalmOne bought up Handspring (the company that originally made the Treo) because they couldn’t compete with it, and now that they own it, they are taking largely the work that Handspring did with the device and pushing it out without some needed upgrades. The lack of an upgraded camera was bad enough, but something I could live with, but the more I think about it, this memory issue just makes me mad.

Unfortunately, PalmOne probably knows that it’s really the only game in town when it comes to PalmOS-based smartphones. Sure there are PocketPC phones, but many of them are bulky, and the ones that aren’t either require a stylus to do everything or have other issues. Handspring didn’t cut corners when it came out with the Treo 600 last year. It was so far ahead of previous models and was just very well thought out and redesigned. The 650 seems much more like an enhanced 600, but probably one that has enhancements which add so much that it will be irresistible to most early adopters. So, in other words, PalmOne knows they have us over a barrel. We can whine and complain about how our expectations are not being met and how PalmOne has been a penny wise and a pound foolish and could have avoided all this commotion by simply putting an extra $5 worth of memory into the phone, but in the end, most will probably buy it regardless. And this issue probably won’t dissuade the less-savvy user who just wants to do basic things like calling, emailing, and a little web browsing.

The whole situation, ironically, reminds me a little of what I had to put up with when I had a T-Mobile Sidekick. Many users clamored for a true solution to synch their data with their MS Outlook or other PIM, but despite this actually being available, T-Mobile decided they just didn’t want to offer it. They knew some of its users wanted it, nay NEEDED it badly, but somehow the small cost of supporting those users was too much to bear the risk of losing them.

What it really comes down to is competition. Macs, for all their elegance, are pretty pricey. But they are not prohibitively more than PC’s and so this should mean a much greater market share than their mere 10%. But if PC’s weren’t around and Apple were the only game in town, you can guarantee that Macs would be even costlier. Cheap PC’s have driven the price down of Macs since Apple’s marketshare would be closer to 2% if you had to pay five times the amount for a Mac than a similarly priced PC. Design and usability is one thing, but relatively few people will buy a Jaguar when a Honda will get them where they need to go at a fraction of the price. PalmOne’s lock on the PalmOS smartphone is not so much based on price as it is on the history of the PalmOS. PocketPC devices, desite their abundance, haven’t risen to the promise that this competition implies. They are still priced pretty similarly to PalmOS devices and while they carry some benefits like more memory and faster processors and even Wifi, operationally they are not that much different. So these slight advantages don’t really make up for the similar cost. However, companies that base their thinking on their current place in the pecking order may fall victim to clever upstarts that are willing to take risks. It’s very conceivable that we could have a new smartphone (either a PalmOS device but more likely a PocketPC-based one) that ends up coming out of the blue next year and PalmOne will need to start playing catchup.

Update: Treonaughts has a piece about how Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal has commented about the 650′s memory issues. He specifically says that they should have included more memory to begin with, although it has enough memory for his needs. Perhaps such a prominant article in the periodical for corporate professionals (at least in the financial sector), will get PalmOne moving a little bit faster. Whether all of this will start snowballing to force PalmOne to actually retrofit the 650 with more memory is much more of a longshot, but we can dream.

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Oh the humanity! The promised nirvana of smartphoneness has been yanked from our clutches! Or so it seems.

Just over this past weekend, a firestorm developed over reports that the Treo 650’s new non-volatile memory stored things less efficiently (so that the same files take up more space), and this means that the paltry 22MB of memory available go even more quickly.

One of the big cheerleaders for the 650, Andrew at Treonaughts, wrote a diatribe of how disappointed he was if the reports turn out to be true. I can’t say I would blame him either.

This is not the first time PalmOne has disappointed us. When the 650 was first announced, we found out that it would have the same amount of memory as the current 600 and also that it’s camera would not be the expected 1.3 Megapixel improved one everyone was expecting, but the same one as the 600 as well. Then there was the whole debacle around the crippling of the bluetooth implementation for Sprint customers which Sprint then had to backtrack on based on the outcry.

I want to be fair to PalmOne and I’m sure there are very valid reasons for not including certain items, be they technical or cost-related. But it is truly hard to imagine why no additional memory could have been added. I realize that the volatile memory in the Treo 600 is cheaper than the non-volatile memory in the 650, but the non-volatile memory in all the flash memory sticks and cards that are sold for digital cameras have come down in price significantly over the last year. I’m betting they’ve at least halved in price. One can now buy 1GB of flash memory with mail-in rebates for as low as $50, maybe lower. And this is retail. Wholesale I’m sure the prices are significantly less. So adding an additional 32MB of memory I’m thinking would add a couple of bucks to the phone’s cost.

PalmOne is currently pleading for a few days while they do a group huddle to figure out whether the claims are accurate and then what should be done about it. It seems like they may be understanding what being a pennywise and a pound foolish is about. Handspring developed the Treo 600 and was subsequently bought up by PalmOne, so I wonder what the corporate culture of PalmOne did to change things in terms of strategy for the 650. Some have suggested that this was merely a marketing strategy that would put out a more basic model first, then trump it with subsequent releases that offered more memory and perhaps other features. But if this were the case, it would be unfair to those who would opt for the top of the line but based on the information that’s been given them can’t expect any new models for another year and so, and this would just alienate some of the earliest adopters and biggest fans of the phone.

Currently the only Treo 650’s on sale are CDMA models from Sprint. This is another snub, in my mind, to a huge cross-section of the Treo’s potential customer base. PalmOne decided to partner with Sprint to give them exclusive rights to all Treo 650’s produced until next year. While this has angered a lot of non-Sprint customer, it also seems to be (as PalmOne’s decisison to keep the amount of memory the same) devine retribution. Now all these Sprint models will be crippled and will have to be, undoubtedly, recalled to the factory for upgrading of their memory. When PalmOne finally gets around to producing their GSM models for T-Mobile, and AT&T/Cingular, they will have to have this memory issue nipped in the bud. But by then it may be too late. The word on the street will grow that the phone has issues and this will at least delay further sales, and possibly just hamper sales in general.

The whole idea of the 650 has been tarnished for me and while I still crave many of its improvements over the 600, I can’t justify putting many hundreds down for such an incomplete product and one who’s company seems clueless. I may yet have to start looking at some PocketPC phones next year, although for now the 600 does everything I need. No doubt PalmOne has a lot of damage control to do right now, and I wish them well. Hopefully they will use this as an opportunity to improve the product even further, even if it means a slight price increase.

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Having owned a Sidekick for a while, I’m very familiar with it’s reputation as a celebrity phone. Danger actually does list celebrities as one of it’s target markets! Personally I could care less who uses the phone I do, as long as it works the way I want. In other words, I’m totally not into the whole idea of supposed coolness because you where something or do something similar to a famous person. Many of the celebrities you see with phones visible from any company have actually been given the phone in the hope that they will increase it’s visibility and thus is clout. It’s kind of like a product placement, and while it’s possible that sometimes such deals are formalized in contracts, others I’m sure are just hopeful giveaways. And of course we all know that poor celebrities need all the freebies they can get!

So, with that in mind, I thought I’d try trumping the Sidekick’s cache of associated fame and basically beat it at it’s own game. I’m trying to gather a list of famous people who own and love their Treos. It may not be as flashy as those who own Sidekick’s, but I’m sure it will impress a lot more people to know that Lou Reed uses a Treo 600 than Lindsay Lohan. Maybe not teens or tweens, but guess what, companies, teens aren’t your only market!

So, I found another article about a whole bunch of celebrities who have Treo 600’s, mostly musicians as one would have it. Lou Reed, as I mentioned, as well as Peter Gabriel, Philip Glass, Branford Marsalis, Metallica, Aatronaut Buzz Aldrin and actor Kevin Spacey. Hmmm, no women. Apparently Matthew Broderick carries one as well.

In addition to celebs owning and using Treos in public, there is also Treos placed in TV programs and movies. Actually, seeing a Treo 600 used in a recent episode of The West Wing was what prompted all of this. Josh is seen using the phone in an attempt to reach Leo, the Chief of Staff. None of the Treo’s special abilities are highlighted – it’s just being used as a phone and that’s all. Also, a month or two ago I was flipping channels and saw a Treo on Disney or one of the other kids channels. There was a made-for-tv movie playing about a famous rock star who has dropped his phone with all of its scheduling and address info and this was picked up by a couple of adoring fans who then were trying to find him to return it. While this trumpeted a lot of cool features, they actually overlaid the Treo’s real screen with something that was computer generated to make it look a lot nicer and easier to read.

Well, if you know of other celebs you have the Treo and love it, let us know, even if you are that celebrity. Hey, we could have a celebrity war – Treo celebrities against Sidekick Celebrities. Hmmm, I see a new reality show in the making!

Update: Well, it looks you can add Howard Stern to the list – he talked about it on his radio show recently!

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The dust has settled a bit with announcements about the new Treo 650. We’ve gotten a much clearer picture as to what the phone will have and what it won’t. I thought it might be useful for those who already have a Treo 600 or a similar device to list potential reasons to upgrade to this new version, since some people have been dissapointed with some of the phones features, or lack thereof. I’m writing this for myself as well, kind of my own “thinking out” about whether it makes sense for me to buy this thing. Sure I would upgrade in a second if the money wasn’t an issue, but $600 is not an insignificant amount of money for me, nor for most people. Those who don’t own any kind of smartphone type of device but have been looking to get into this world with the release of the 650, I think, can really ignore most of the criticisms. For the most part it looks like a great phone. While there are definitely features that I would like to have seen which it lacks, features which will probably be available in a future generation Treo (the theoretical Treo 700), you could say this about almost any technology. The next generation will almost be undoubtedly better, and in many cases even cheaper to boot!

The disappointments have been given and while their definitely are some valid ones, none are actually items that are new to the 650. In other words, they are simply disappointments because leaks had made us believe that there would be big improvements that weren’t there, or that a feature might be added that, as it turns out, was not. So, for those things, the phone simply has not made IMPROVEMENTS, it’s not gotten worse or less functional.

So, here are the items that I can see convincing current Treo 600 (or similar devices) owners to go for a 650:

Higher resolution, more colors: although this is no revolutionary new feature and doesn’t carry the buzz of “Bluetooth” it still will make a huge difference in usability because the screen in general will be clearer, fonts will be smoother, you will be able to see more text on a given page, etc.

• Speed: This is actually two-pronged:

Processor Speed: the higher speed 312Mghz processor which will allow for much more processor intensive stuff, like better video, flash animation, and more sophisticated programs.

Communication speed: the 650 will be capable of communicating via EDGE or EV-DO, 3G technologies which will make doing any kind of data transfer many times faster than the more basic protocols that the current Treo 600 uses. So, downloading new programs, synching your data over the air, or just viewing web pages will get much faster. However, this assumes that your carrier employs these technologies in your area. AT&T (which is finally merging with Cingular) has the only national EDGE network. T-Mobile supposedly is in the process of upgrading to EDGE, but I couldn’t find anything specific or official about a roll-out. Verizon has an expanding EV-DO network and Sprint has plans to have a nationwide EV-DO network by sometime next year.

• Bluetooth: for Bluetooth fanatics, this feature alone will make them upgrade. I admit I am not one of them. I never quite understood this obsession. I mean it’s nice not to have wires, but it seems more of an aesthetic thing, rather than something super useful and while I can certainly appreciate aesthetics, it’s not top priority for me. In any case, Bluetooth will allow wireless headsets, wireless GPS devices, wireless synching, etc., and just means less wires to keep track of, which is always a good thing.

• Video: Ok, so the camera is the same crappy .3 megapixel as the 600, but at least there’s one big improvement here, Video capture. Being able to see video clips, albeit small and short ones, will actually improve the overall “capture of the moment.” Increasing resolution for a still image can add to the reality of a shot, but so can being able to capture multiple images over time and so actually capture what it was like to be there for 10 seconds (or whatever), not just a frozen moment in time. Sure it’s a bit of a rationalization, but you know you want to indulge it!

• Synch: for corporate-types who currently use a Blackberry, or just for those people who want a seamless solution to keep track of their mail, appointments, and to-do-list, this could be a big factor. Out of the box, the 650 will come with support for Activesynch, which will allow for synching of data between the Treo and an exchange server over the air, similar to what the Blackberry has, but maybe without the email. However, Versamail will take charge of the email aspect and synch that. For those who really like the Blackberry’s system, RIM will be coming out with it’s own Blackberry software implementation for the Treo, although this will be an extra purchase. And perhaps the Blackberry software will offer push email functionality, which I have not heard anything about so far for the 650.

• Battery Life: with a removable battery, the potential battery life of the 650 is infinite. Ok, well, maybe not practically, but theoretically. A lot of people will at least buy one extra and then me able to go at least a couple with heavy data usage and not have to be in fear of it dying on them.

• Keyboard: the Treo 600’s keyboard, while usable, is not something one would want to write long essays in! Not that one would want to do this on a 650 either, but from what we’ve gathered, the keyboard will be enhanced. It certainly looks nicer and the keys look bigger and flatter, and just more typable. We’ll need to check in with people who’ve gotten to play a bit with the 650 to really find out how this new one shapes up. I don’t want to get too excited for fear that this could be another disappointment, but at least potentially this could be something that makes the device much more usable as a mobile alternative to emailing and other things which involve a fair amount of typing.

I could be forgetting something, but I think these are the key feature upgrades from the Treo 600. I’m still not sure if I will purchase one myself. I’m a bit spoiled in that I got the Treo 600 for a ridiculously low price thanks to a very generous friend, so paying he full $600 or thereabouts for this phone is going to be difficult. On the other hand, I will definitely be keeping track of the early reviews and will try one out as soon as they are in Sprint Stores (I’m not a Sprint customer but they will be the first to carry the phones, so hopefully they will have them available to at least play around with), or other stores that sell Sprint phones/service. At the very least I will try to get my hands on a Treo 650 if even for a week so that I can write up a review and/or a comparison between it and the Danger Sidekick II.

Finally, I thought I’d leave you with a list of additional articles I’ve found on the unveiling of the Treo 650:

Want a Treo 650? Better Sprint – CNet

Finally! The Treo 650 Arrives – PC Magazine

PalmOne launches Treo 650 – The Register

Live From CTIA – Sprint and AT&T Announce Treo 650 Plan – BargainPDA.com

Sprint to be first carrier to offer Treo 650 – myTreo.net

Treonauts Spends 1 Hour with the Treo 650 In Hand – Treonauts

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There’s a whole lot of buzz going on about the newly unveiled Treo 650. Unfortunately a fair about of it is actually a bit on the negative side. This is part of the problem with having lots of leaks getting out which at most match but in some cases have exceeded what was actually the case in regards to the 650′s capabilities.

The main overexpectation relates to camera on the 650. For weeks, the rumors and asserted pretty categorically that it would be a much improved 1.3 megapixels, a resolution at which one could actually print 4×6’s that look identical or nearly so to film. But as it turns out, this is not the case. The camera is the same 640×480 (0.3 megapixels) that the Treo 600 camera is. This is good enough for sharing some small images on the web, or between phones, but not much else. As a digital photography afficiando, this is of course very disappointing to me and especially considering that many much cheaper and smaller phones have been coming out with 1.3 or higher megapixel cameras, it really doesn’t make much sense. Heck, there’s even a 5 megapixel camera now! Oh, but wait, the new phone has a 2x digital zoom! Oh, I guess that makes up for any lack of resolution, hahah! To be fair, the camera is supposed to be enhanced, but I’m not sure if that means optically. What it does mean is that the phone will be able to take small video clips (no word on actual length or resolution specifics yet), so at least that’s something.

There’s also been some confirmation that Wifi will not be supported, at least in terms of an expansion card that offers this functionality. For the Treo 600, this was due to power capacity for the SD slot, but it seems that radio interference is what PalmOne is using as its excuse this time around. While this is disappointing as well, there wasn’t an expectation that it would be offered. I think such functionality should be, but then again, I think we will see within the next two or three years a kind of merging of current cellular technologies, wireless internet technologies, Voice Over IP, etc. As they all race towards higher speeds and larger coverage areas, this will undoubtedly mean competition for mobile users who want to talk and use network services at high speeds from anywhere and everywhere.

Sprint, which apparently will offer their 650 first, as with the 600, had PalmOne disable the Bluetooth functionality for their Sprint-branded phones. This is reportedly because they don’t want the Treo to use Bluetooth as a way for the phone to act as a cellular modem to connect a computer to the internet. I actually used to do this a few years ago with an old Palm Vx via the IR port, but I think Bluetooth offers a lot more speed. Then again, we are still talking about modem speeds at most and it’s hard to believe that users who would do this wouldn’t just try to do the same thing via a USB hotsynch connection. This is yet another example of how Sprint, as others, have actually crippled users capabilities for no good reason. Yes, it means some people will be using their connections more, but if the customer can talk on these connections instead, why not use data? Perhaps Sprint customers should signal their displeasure by calling people and staying on for hours (overnight?) during free calling periods.

Looks like the 650 will have the same smaller 2.5mm headphone jack, meaning that in order to plug in a standard set of headphones (say the ones you use for your portable MP3 player), you will need still need that extra adapter.

Ok, so much for the bad stuff, what about the good stuff? Well, for one, the multimedia press release, which is a series of videos of people using the Treo and its various features (note: the videos seemed to lean a little towards the business end of things. They did show a woman taking a picture of a car, but my main thought is that maybe they are trying to market the 650 more towards the business user, and this seems to be born out by the much tighter integration with MS Exchange. This would also explain, at least somewhat, the lack of improvement with the camera, since cameraphones are seen more as consumer/non-business devices), shows a wireless keyboard. If you check out the Treo 650 Add-ons product page, you will not that this is not Bluetooth as I had initially thought, but infrared. Still, this is new for the Treo and should provide a better interface for those who do extensive keying. It looks to be slightly larger than the Treo when folded up, but expands to be about ¾ the size of a laptop keyboard. Then again, with the improved keyboard of the 650, I wonder if having an external one will be much of an issue.

Luckily PalmOne will be coming out with their own Bluetooth wireless headest (no longer available) and at $100, it seems pretty competitive. Not quite as competitively priced – to the point of being entertaining – is a 256MB SD memory card that PalmOne wants to charge you $80 for. I realize that maybe they feel like they have to offer it and will actually make some serious profit from this from people who don’t know or care that you can get four times this amount for about the same price in many places online and offline, but still, it’s a bit shameless! Hmmm, that’s odd, another page on their site details their range of SD prices and lists the same 256MB card for $60 instead! Get it streight, will ya? Still way overpriced, but not quite as bad.

On PalmOne’s Bluetooth page, we do see mention of a “Bluetooth-enabled GPS accessory” but the link provided just goes to the general “Add-ons” page with no information about such accessories. Still, this type of GPS receiver has been available for other devices, so I’m sure that those will work fine with the 650 if it has a standard implementation of Bluetooth. This does lead me to wonder, though. Would it be possible for a company to come up with a device that provides Wifi connectivity and then routes that to a Treo via Bluetooth? I haven’t done the research to know whether this is possible or whether it’s already been developed, but that would be one way of getting around the lack of a built-in Wifi capability and the lack of support for a Wifi expansion SD card…

As far as software, the camera interfcase, the phone interface, and the web browser have been redesigned. The mail application has been replaced by Versamail, a much more full-featured product which will sync not only your email but also your calendar with Microsoft Exchange servers, although I still saw no mention of “push” delivery. Realplayer has also been added (replacing a free coupon for PocketTunes), which it looks like will only be used for listening to MP3′s rather than watching steaming (or non-streaming) video.

Here are a few other links to stories that haven’t been mentioned already:

Treo 650 is Official – Engadget

Even more Treo 650 pics – Engadget

Treo 650 Announced – very detailed report from TreoCentral.com

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As promised, we hear today from PalmOne about the Treo 650. Thanks to the hard work over at Treonauts, here are a few links to official press releases about it:

• Official PalmOne Press Release
• PalmOne Multimedia Press Release
• PalmOne Treo 650 Product Page

This is a lot of information to digest, so I’ll be going through it shortly and posting more commentary, as well as additional links as they become available this morning, so stay tuned!

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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.

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