INBOX:THERE WAS a time when one company dominated the smartphone market. Its name was Palm and the product was the Treo, a seamless marriage of the massively popular Palm Pilot digital assistant of the late 1990s and a mobile phone, writes Mike Butcher.
No thrusting Silicon Valley technology executive would be without one, such was their iconic status. Today, Palm has lost its way, eclipsed by the double whammy of the iPhone and the Blackberry. Could a new handset, now being launched in Europe, improve its fortunes?
The Palm Treo 500 eschews the now faded Palm OS for the Windows Mobile operating system. This seems an odd choice, since even the old-fashioned Palm OS enabled the handset to have a touch screen. The short answer is that Palm has made this handset to live alongside Windows machines, especially the new Vista operating system.
Running Windows Mobile 6, the 500 is the child of Palm's increasing reliance on Microsoft, which is part of the reason the final quarter of last year saw it post a loss of $9.63 million compared with a profit of $12.7 million over the same period in 2006.
Palm had done a roaring trade in its Palm OS-powered Treos but it has had to bow to the increasing dominance of the Redmond giant.
Thus, where the 500 shines is in syncing with Windows Vista and Office 2007, something at which not all smartphones excel. The slimmed-down versions of Word and Excel, which come as standard, mean you can edit documents while on the go, assuming you can deal with a small keyboard that will not appeal to large-fingered users.
At least the screen is bright enough for general use.
The other main strength of the Palm Treo 500 is that it is a tad cheaper than many other smartphones, coming free on a Vodafone contract or you can buy it SIM-free direct from Palm for about €319.95 (on Expansys.ie), enabling you to slot in any SIM of your choice.
However, the Treo 500 is not going to win any awards for extra features. Although it does have Bluetooth, there is no GPS or Wi-Fi and the camera quality is on the low side at 2.0 megapixels. Although the tri-band 500 will take a 3G SIM card, it does not support EDGE or HSPDA for faster mobile web access, which leaves it in the slow lane among its peers.
Battery life is not amazing, with about 4½ hours of talk time and, although Palm claims 10 days' standby, I would expect three days judging by the performance of earlier models.
All in all, the Palm Treo 500 is rather like its maker. Neither the last word in cutting-edge design and technology, nor cheap enough or easy enough to use to make it a mass-market player.
Unless Palm can come up with something else pretty soon, it looks like their days as smartphone king are well and truly over.
