All projects: Gel, Jobs, Gootodo, Games, Uncle Mark, Goovite, Blog, Bit Literacy
The troubled Palm Treo
Sep 10, 2007
For years I've recommended Palm Treos in my annual Uncle Mark guide. That will change in a few weeks when I release Uncle Mark 2008 and recommend the iPhone - and recommend against the Palm Treo.
Problems with Palm have been mounting for awhile:
• Back in May, a WashPo blogger criticized Palm for its increasingly unreliable Treo smartphones:
Palm is failing to live up to the basic promise of the high-tech world--that its products will continue to get better, faster and cheaper every year. At worst, this company is no longer capable of innovating. At best, it retains that ability but lacks the manners to tell its customers just what it plans to do to get back on track--"trust me" will no longer suffice.
• In late August the techie blog Engadget wrote Dear Palm: It's time for an intervention.
• Finally, this past weekend, NYT's Joe Nocera complained about his buggy, unreliable Palm Treo (reg. required):
...maybe Treos [are] simply lousy devices. Maybe I should never have believed The Wall Street Journal’s technology guru, Walt Mossberg, who wrote in early 2006 that “Palm’s Treo smartphones have been the best high-end cellphones on the market, with the finest combination of voice, e-mail and Web-browsing capabilities in a hand-held device.” Maybe I was a fool to assume, as I clearly had, that just because Palm had once made great products, it was still making great products. Then my Treo died, and that gave me my answer.
Palm has its work cut out: whatever it creates next must offer a good user experience.
See also: iPhone and Nokia's attempted copy
When I bought my Palm Tungsten E lo, these many years ago, I said to myself: "Once Palm makes a great device with the Palm apps I love, a great music player that I don't need to carry SD cards for, and a phone, I will buy it and stop carrying all these different gadgets." Then the Treo came out... without enough storage for my music. I bought an iPod, thinking "The Treo will now catch up! The next Treo will be it!" I'm still waiting. In the meantime, the iPhone has come out... I'm still looking wistful.
I recently got a Treo 755p from Sprint and am quite satisfied with it. The internet is quite usable, the 60meg user memory is enough, I can use a bluetooth gps (with mapopolis and telenav, but not with google maps), and the mini sd card allows me to store maps, mp3s and other good stuff.
I like it.