How Palm's Treo Got Boost From BlackBerry Lawsuit 135
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Palm ramped up its marketing campaign for its Treo smartphone while rival Research in Motion was embroiled in a patent fight, the Wall Street Journal reports. 'The result: at least 1,500 new inquiries about the Treo in the past few months from corporate customers, resulting in 600 free trials, Palm says. In total, Palm says it has more than doubled its number of sales leads since October. "The doors have been opening," says Ed Colligan, Palm's chief executive. At a November staff meeting, Mr. Colligan says he told his staff to "step things up. We have to go back and knock on doors and respond as fast as we can." ... Internally, Palm executives say they believe that the Treo will outsell BlackBerrys by the end of this year.'"
Maybe. (Score:4, Insightful)
I got a Samsung A900. It supports Sprints new Power Vision high speed network. I can surf to any site including slashdot, I can get my email, set appointments on my calendar. It is also super small and has a great screen. The battery only lasts for one day but I can live with that.
The current Treos that support high speed all run Windows. I have heard very mixed reviews on them and Verizon charges a lot more for the data plan for the Treo than other phones.
I will look a the the Treo when they have there new Linux based PalmOS and the Data plan costs the same as my current one. Oh and PUT SOME RAM on the bloody things!
Re:that sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
I like PalmOS and I like my Treo 180 a lot, but I am starting to get sick of PalmOS' ancient technology. No memory protection? What century is this again?
Re:that sucks (Score:3, Insightful)
The Treo is the most versatile device I've ever used, wrapped in a great, simple, and above all usable interface. A great phone, great synchronization with my computer (I use Missing Sync on Mac OS X for sync with Address Book, iCal, iTunes, iPhoto, file sync, etc), it has full internet access, multimedia capability, games, you name it. I now have a single address book that supplies my phone, PDA, e-mail, instant messaging, etc. And did I mention it wraps all of this functionality in a really, really usable easy interface?
Just try to do a *fraction* of this on a BlackBerry. On a BlackBerry you get... e-mail. Yay.
Um... on my BlackBerry I have all that, minus the audio/video stuff. I have an RSS reader, I have Google Maps, I have an SSH client, I can read Office docs and PDFs, and I have a better web browser [Opera] than anything that exists on the Palm platform... and the syncing with Exchange is MILES ahead of what you can do with a Treo (make a change in Outlook, and it's there in my BlackBerry a minute later, and vice versa). All my contacts, calendars, email, notes, everything. It's all synced wirelessly and automatically. I've had this thing for 4-5 months now and it's never even been plugged into a computer (and it hasn't crashed once).
Yes, the Treo is more featureful, and there's far more 3rd party software. But when the basic (and most important) functions are unreliable, all the features and 3rd-party addons in the world don't matter. The BlackBerry is a true geek device - it has a small set of functionality, but it does it perfectly. The Treo tries to be all things to all people and ends up doing nothing well.
That said, I do have one big gripe with the BlackBerry - horrendous (HORRENDOUS!) fonts, and apparently no way to do anything about it. The Treo has horrible fonts out of the box too, but there are addons that add gorgeous, anti-aliased fonts.