-- - I I I I DAVID POGUE TheAwkward Finally, there was a problem with Smart Phone the Treo's memory. It's a special kind that doesn't erase all your data when the Treo's battery dies (unlike most previous Palms), which is Grows Up good. Unfortunately, the new memo- D now, another episode of ry format had a side effect: each tid- gadgetry's long-running bit of information took up a huge '. corporate soap opera, "As amount of storage. An SO-kilobytead- dress book could balloon to 334kilo- A. thePalm Turns."- Previously Qn""A.P.T.": In Season -bytes on the Treo 650,Many who up- I. (1996), Palm Computing developed graded from the Treo 600to the 650 the smash-hit Pilot organizer. The found that their programs and data company was swallowed by U.S. Ro- would no longer fit. botics, which in turn was snapped up- It must be the sweeps season, be- by 3Com. Frustrated, Palm's cause in the last few weeks, all three founders resigned and founded the of those plot twists have finally been rival Handspring. 3Com then spun resolved. In May, Verizon finally out Palm as an independent entity made its ownTreo 650available once again, whereupon it soon split ($400with a two-year commitment). into two companies, PalmOne (hard- Then, two weeks ago, ~print released ware) and PalmSource (software), a software patch that unlocked the and Palm One acquired the ailing Bluetooth laptop-dialing feature. Handspring. Finally, Palm solved the memory In the latest exciting installment, problem. The new software, installed PalmOne has bought back the name on all current Treos (including Veri- Palm from the struggling Palm. zon's), reduces the size of each ap- Source, whose future is in doubt. By pointment or address-book entry year's end, Palm One will once again from 512bytes to 32, making the be called Palm, making you wonder . phone's 23 megabytes of memory if the whole thing was anine-year- much more efficient and thrilling the long dream. S.P .R.B.A. (Society of People With Now, if you watch Seasons 6 Really Big Address Books). If you through 9 closely on DVD,you'U see have an older Sprint Treo (or an "un- a minor character gradually rise to . locked" Treo - one that can be used prominence: with any G.S.M. carrier), you can the Treo smart . download an updateI' from palm phone,Intro- .com; a similar updateI' for CingulaI' I duced by Hand- Treos is on the way. I spring in 2002. So now the Treo 650,once a gawky ",From the very adolescent, is aliigrown up and firing I beginning, the on all cylinders. How does it hold up I name reflected against its younger, more aggressive the Treo's . rivals? I triple goal: to Purely in terms of its feature list, I combine an or- the Treo is no longer state of the art. ganizer, a cell- It doesn't have Wi-Fi wireless net- I StuartGoldenberg phone and a working, so you can't hop onto Inter- I - pocket Internet net hot spots at airports and coffee I terminal with asfew.compromises shops. Nor can it get online at the as possible. More than 1.7 million near-cable-modem speed of Veri- have been sold. lOn's BroadbandAccess network, as With its string of marriage!; and the expensive new Samsung i730can. divorces behind it - at least for now The Treo's digital camera'takes - Palm has realized that the Treo is its future. The market'forstand- Continued on Page 8 alone organiiers~tcoolingi_so Palm~' . has announced thaiitis"'shiffijf!fitS~' l1l'i emphasis to thesmart phone space." The latest model, the'Tteo 650, made its debut last November. Most reviewers praised it, but not every- ~ one was excited.. For one thing, it 'was available only from Sprint and,later; CingulaI'; Verizon's 40 million cus- tomers were stuck with the aging Treo 600 model. For another, the 650 was supposed to offer Bluetooth; a. wireless technology that lets the cell- phone act asa sort of Internet modem for your laptop. But Sprint and CingulaI' disabled that aspect of Bluetooth. I I I I The,A,wkward Smart Phone Grows:!Up~ .J'reo~stinythumb-driven keyboard; "Fneo~E'al1tily,Tree:'The Handspring'Branch rsaxe the size of partly dis. bcs..But you' dbe sur~ I; lightup.verybright- . they!re just right, and the tops arci'oun Mtominimize double- pressing byfatthumbs. The software' assists in every possible way, too, auto-capping sentences, auto- inserting apostrophes and auto- switching to number-typing mode when dialing or typingin1>hone num- bers. The 650has a reasonably speedy Webbrowser, and when it comes to e-mail, the Treopractically out" BlackBerries the BlackBerry: Cor- porations can buy any of several "push" e-mailprog'rams, meaning your Treo gets messages as they ar- rive, instead of having to checkat VISOR DELUXE (1999) An ini- VISORPRISM:(2000t A ver- TREOA.180(2002) Organizer regular intervals. These programs tiaL Handspring use sion, 'bringingcoloPito the and:(cellphone combined, also offer wireless synching;.when Palm's bperating system: Visor's display. wifl,la QWERTY keypad: you delete or file a message onthe. phone; it's instantly deleted or filed on your PC at work. If your name doesn't end in Inc., you have other options. Yau can set uptheTteo to checkyourregularr e-mail account every)5'minutes, for example. Or you can sign up for serv- ices fromVerizon, Sprint,Visto or Yahoo that offer variations on that same real-time, wireless synching. That way, you get all the joy of corpo- rate BlackBerry ownership without having either a BlackBerry or a cor- poration. The Treo really shines, though; in' the little touches that bear the paw- prints of obsessive-compulsivede~ signers. For example, it offers to add a newly dialed number tothe ad- dress book, so you'll have itfornext TREO: 270 (2002t Hand~ TREO600,(2003) The last de- TREO650 (2004-051 The.lat- . time. You can also assign a different spring!s "smart phone" vice from Handspring, est generation, getting' bet",: ring to each caller, and, on any Treo rebranded as PalmOne: ter with age. except Sprint's, even record new ring witha,col~F~~~plaX" tones otyour own. (Your spouse's ring can be, "Honey,it'sme"') You can look up a number ina life than long feature lists. (Look at smooth, solid-feeling bodyfitscom", thousand.nameaddress book just by Continued From First Business Page the BlackBerry, a Treo rival. It does- fortably in your hand. It's much typing the person's initials - and n't have a camera, Wi-Fi or Blue- more compact than,a BlackBerry, then dialwith one key press. And the better pictures than its predecessor, tooth, but that hasn't deterred its too, so people will be much less likely Treo)s physical Ringer Off switch is but they're puny by today's stand- three million subscribers world- to think you're talking into aPop~ so brilliant and useful, it ought to be- Tart. anls. At 0.3megapixels,they have wide.) come an F.C.C. requirement. enoughresolution for sharing on the It turns out that Treo 650 succeeds At 320by 320pixels, the bright, The Treo is not entirely compro- screen, but not for printing: . because of somethingthat doesn't, gorgeous color screen offers higher mise-free; some might consider a . TheTreo's Bluetooth feature still and can't, show up on any feature resolution-than most rivals,meaning two-inch-wide keyboard, for exam- isn't fully realized, either. It commu- list: spit and polish. The thought and supersharp (if tiny) text and graph- ple, to be the very definition of a com- nicates with Bluetooth wireless ear- ics. It's also a touch screen a skin- cleverness that have gone into this - promise. But it's safe to say that the iii pieces, and it can wirelessly synchro- device's design put most other smart ny stylus tucks into the back of the Treo 650 comes closer to its original nize data with a Mac or PC But Cin- phones to shame. phone - which is handy if you install "no compromises"goal than lUly- gular andVerizon.still don't let you You could argue, for example, that any of the thousands of P alm~ thing yet designed. ' usethephone as a wireless laptop core cellphone features like battery compatible programs available Will the next Treooffer broad- modem, and the Treo still can't com- life; sound quality and simpliCity online. You won't need the stylus; band-speed Internet connections? ~, municate with the built-in Bluetooth trump Wi-Fi and high~res photos any though, when you operate the Treo's Will the Treo ever make a substan- audio ,systems of some recentcar day. Sure enough, the Treo's remov- built-in software; it's all been beauti- tial dent in the BlackBerry market? .;models, including the Toyota Prius. able battery is good for five hours of fully designed for one-handed opera- Will Palm find ever more convoluted Then again;'some consumers are .talk time and an amazing 12 days of tion, which is another awfully nice ways to split, merge, separate and beginningto realize there's more to standby. The sound is excellent, and feature to have in a phone. re-form? there's even a speakerphone. It's probably hard to imagine get- Stay tuned. This show has been re- E-mail: [email protected] TheTreo looks great, too, and its ting much writing done with the newed for next season..