For those of you who are keeping score, Operation Gadget was up for two and a half days before our first Treo 600 article.
Yesterday, TheFeature.com published an article by Kevin Werbach called The Triumph of Good Enough. In it, Werbach compares the Treo 600 to its predecessor the Treo 300 and states pithily, “Subtle improvements can have huge consequences.” He goes on:
Almost three years ago, I wrote an article… arguing that converged mobile devices wouldn’t ever dominate the market. A device that is both a phone and a PDA, let alone a music player or a gaming console, will never be as good at any of those functions as a dedicated piece of equipment. I was convinced that most users would carry multiple devices with different form factors, especially since Bluetooth wireless links would easily tie them together.
I’ve changed my mind. One reason is that the Bluetooth community missed its window. Sure, early compatibility issues have been resolved, and more than one million Bluetooth devices are now shipping every week. It’s just too late. WiFi occupies part of Bluetooth’s natural market, and a chunk of the rest is disappearing as functionality merges into multipurpose devices…..
The most important developments, however, are the technical advances in devices themselves. Smaller form factors, better performance, lower prices, and miniaturization of components all play a role. My Treo 600 will never be as good a wireless email device as the single-function Blackberry, nor will it compare to an iPod as a music player. Yet, with a 512 megabyte SD expansion card for those MP3 files, it’s quite serviceable for both functions. The same goes for its prowess as an organizer, camera, and Web browser. Moreover, because the Treo runs a real operating system with storage and downloading capabilities, it’s more adaptable than the single-function devices will ever be. Shortly after buying the Treo, I added an application to read RSS syndication feeds from my favorite Weblogs, and an MP3 player than can pull in live streaming audio from the Web-based Shoutcast service. Try that on an iPod!
This is an amazing article. The Treo 600 runs Palm OS 5, which is reputed to be a quantum leap over the version used in the first generation Treos, Palm OS 3.5. Palm OS 5 is a multitasking OS. This matters at basic levels like composing another email or SMS messages while sending or receiving the previous one. I use SMS extensively on my Treo 180, and the lack of multitasking is really painful.
Werbach calls Palm OS 5 a “real operating system” and there is nothing that indicates this more strongly than the existence of applications like Hand/RSS, a Palm-based RSS aggregator. It’s not free, but, what a great alternative to actually browsing the web.
About a year ago, someone from Europe showed me how a laptop could browse the web using an Internet connection provided by a Bluetooth mobile phone. At the time, I had just started using my Treo 180 and I felt that the Internet access capabilities were less than I had been lead to believe. (Keep in mind, this took place prior to the release of the Treo upgrade that enabled GPRS for the GSM-compatible versions.)
After that demo, the idea of using surfing the web from a laptop was really inticing.
Stepping back for a moment, I asked myself, how often am I going to need this? And, wouldn’t it be more useful to have a single device that could solve 80 percent of my needs when I am away from my office and out of range of a public WiFi access point?
Werbach argues, and I am inclined to agree, that the Treo 600 represents the tipping point for integrated handheld communication devices.