Palm Expected to Unveil Windows Mobile Treo

ABCNews.com ^ | Sept. 26 , 2005 | LinuxDevices.com Staff - PC Magazine

[Bush2000]

Palm Expected to Unveil Windows Mobile Treo

Palm and Microsoft will hold a joint press conference Monday, when they are widely expected to unveil the much-anticipated Palm Treo based on Windows Mobile 5.0.

Palm CEO Ed Colligan, Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates, and Verizon Wireless CEO Denny Strigl will be the featured participants in the San Francisco event, which takes place at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco at 9 a.m. PDT.

Earlier this week, photos purporting to be of a Treo 700w bearing a Verizon logo and running Windows Mobile software were published by Engadget.

Key "confirmed" specs, according to Engadget, include Windows Mobile 5.0, 64 MB of memory, a one Mpixel camera, Bluetooth, and EV-DO.

Based on the Engadget photos, the Treo 700w is similar in appearance to the Palm OS-based Treo 650, but a bit narrower and more rounded at the bottom.

Executives of Palm (recently renamed from "PalmOne") had in the past declined to deny rumors that the company was developing a Windows Mobile version of the Treo, while reportedly characterizing the company as "platform agnostic" and "open to evaluating products using additional operating systems."

Market perspective

Gartner reported earlier this year that Windows CE pushed ahead of PalmOS to become the top OS shipped in PDAs worldwide in 2004, and recently noted that Palm's quarterly PDA market share plummeted from 41.8 percent in the second quarter of 2004 to just 18.8 percent in the same quarter of this year.

Meanwhile, PalmSource, which maintains the Palm OS, recently reorganized itself to focus entirely on a new mobile device software architecture that will use Palm OS as a middleware application platform layer running on top of an embedded Linux operating system.

Given Palm's continued close relationship with PalmSource, it is unclear whether Palm plans to focus exclusively on Windows Mobile, or whether it will be platform-agnostic like Motorola, the No. 2 mobile phone maker worldwide, which now makes mobile phones both based on Windows Mobile and based on Linux.

Both Windows Mobile and embedded Linux are struggling to take market share from market-leader Symbian. Market analyst IDC reported in July that Symbian currently dominates the market for "converged mobile device operating systems" and will gain market share through 2009. Windows and Linux will also grow during that period, reaching about 17 percent market share by 2009, IDC said. In 2004, Symbian held 55.9 percent of the market, with Windows Mobile in second place at 12.7 percent, and embedded Linux third at 11.3 percent, IDC said.

Overall, however, high-end "converged" mobile phones market—generally called "smartphones"—continue to represent a small, though rapidly growing, share of the entire mobile phone market. ABI Research estimated last year that 98 percent of the mobile phone market still represented lower-end devices based on proprietary operating systems, but that by 2009 the smartphone segment would grow to nearly a quarter of all handsets shipped by 2009.

Gartner forecasts that sales of mobile phones in general will surpass 1 billion units in 2009, and that smartphones will reach the 200 million mark one year earlier, in 2008.

[Bush2000]

M$ continues to expand its lead in the the embedded market. God, that must p*ss off the ABMer zealots...

[null and void]

Going to windoze? Gosh, that's a step up...

[newgeezer]

The latest chapter in the longtime bestseller, If You Can't Beat 'Em, Join 'Em.

[grb]

Palm software sucks. Calendar data has been corrupted several times. Went back to pencil and paper

[Bush2000]

[adaven]

I agree. Palm OS sucks. I'll take Windows Mobile any day.

[dts32041]

Old news this has been anticipated for about 3 weeks when the 700 pictures were sneaked.

Of course it will only work on verizon.

[dts32041]

Now when my cell phone comes with a built in 4 gig hd bluetooth and wifi, might switch, but so far nothing has this will stick with the LD and my nokia 6255i.

[Rate_Determining_Step]

I was stuck in PalmOS hell for about 5 years. The PalmOS really sucks.

I moved to an iPaq.

Better, but from the PalmOS, everything is better.

The PocketPC is pretty bad as well. I hate it. Although not as bad as the PalmOS. In the end, handhelds are never going to take off.

I'm gonna get a Fujitsu P1500D subnotebook/tablet and run a real operating system to get real work done.

[Bush2000]

You do realize that we're talking about SmartPhones, not PocketPCs, right?

[Rate_Determining_Step]

Six/one-half-dozen.

I guess the integrated phone book and phone itself would allow for it to actually do a job properly.

The way I see it, when you're talking about scarce resources - which are ALL present in the PDA/SmartPhone - the harder you have to work on making the software excellent.

As Windows users learned when OS/2 and Amiga disappeared in the rearview mirror, the #1 constant in the computer world is "Apps rule the world". The dearth of PDA apps, especially from MS, don't speak well for this.

I don't think this is a technical problem. As Pocket Excel, Word and Quicken are out there and they work well. And ActiveSync worked pretty good as well.

Why MS doesn't get serious about applications rather than spending all their time working with hardware vendors is beyond me.

I guess I'm a little bent outta shape. Trying to configure a SD-Card Wi-Fi router with the built in toy tools in the PocketPC OS is maddening. I've had the unit for about a year and I just feel like it's a waste.

Although a PocketPC would be lightyears ahead of the JavaCrap Morotola operating systems. My experience with "high end" phones is even less satisfying than PDAs.

[longtermmemmory]

now if only nextel would join the 21st century