New Smartness: The Palm Treo Pro

I’ve given Palm a hard time lately. And I’ve loved Palm’s past products. The previous few Treo model designs had become dated, the OS old. As a matter of fact, Palm has not released a true update to their operating system in over 4 years.

Last year Palm hit a road bump with the stillborn Foleo, an ultraportable mobile PC device that required another Palm device (i.e. Treo, Centro) to connect with the internet. The price (in my opinion) was prohibitive, but at least it would have opened the door to another market for Palm and they could compete with the slew of other ultra-portable PC’s now hitting the market like the HP Mini-Note or the Eee PC.

Since I last wrote about Palm’s offerings, (and the Foleo’s early demise) they have stated that they were going to go back to the drawing board and come back with something new.

A good beginning to Palm’s comeback was the inexpensive Centro which was quickly penned as a very good introduction to the smartphone market for someone with no experience with one. Even the though Palm incorporated the aging OS 5 (oooooooold!), the cellphone sold smartly.

And now finally, Palm has brought a real competitor to the ring…

The Palm Treo Pro
The new device features tri-band UMTS, quad-band GSM, GPS, 802.11b/g, a 320 x 320 touchscreen display, 256MB ROM, 128MB RAM, a 2-megapixel camera, support for microSDHC cards up to 32GB... and a standard 3.5mm headphone jack. A great new beginning for a line of phones that were beginning to lag sorely behind the rest of the pack. Another thing. The Pro will run Windows Mobile instead of a newer version of the Palm OS. The fact that the mobile operating system by Microsoft (12% global market share) has an ever growing fanbase perhaps is a reason. (Nokia’s Symbian is the number 1 OS found in the world – 51% followed by Blackberry - 17%)



I will say this, The Palm Treo Pro is a right ‘smart’ looking phone and for a contract-free $549 here in the States, it immediately becomes a competitor to other smartphones with similar features such as the HTC Touch and Nokia’s N and E lines of intelligent designs.

However, since most people in the U.S. rely on carrier subsidies for phone purchases, it will remain to be seen if the new Treo Pro sells well until that happens. Rumor has it that carrier may be AT&T.

In my opinion this is a very good reboot for Palm’s Treo franchise, but with other smartphones such as the iPhone and a number of new RIM Blackberry and HTC products, Palm may be arriving too late to the party. To be honest, I hope not. I want this one to win.

~via Engadget