This isn't a direct answer, however its of interest to people interested in this. Sadly however some of the links are broken or missing information. A member of the SynthDIY mailing list bought a Bell Labs Speech Board and put some info up here : http://www.oldcrows.net/~patchell/voicesynth/voicesynth.html Sadly the link to the schematic is broken but I've emailed to see if he can fix it. Jim also did some experiments and eventually made an insanely complex vocal filter board : http://www.oldcrows.net/~patchell/vocalfilter/vocalfilter.html He also did a board layout and sold some boards for a vocal filter : http://www.oldcrows.net/~patchell/synthmodules/vocalfilter.html I rather expect that the Philips COFFEE machine is closely related to these sorts of circuits. I can't find a link right now, but there was an S-100 phonetic speech synth card that contained a bunch of ROMs and a complete set of vocal filters. It didn't use one of the several LSI chips that were around in the 70s/80s ( Votrax and friends ).

So, reading the Red Mercury article it talks about the T5 having 256megs of NAND flash and that the Treo650 has NAND flash also which is accessed like a disk. I can find nothing that says how much NAND is in the Treo650, but if its the same at the T5 shouldnt this just mean that Palm apps just need to be written a bit differently? Unstead of relying on the combined small battery backed ram, write your app more like a real computer app and access your data out of NVFS.

If so, this is less a flaw and more a move towards making the Treo into a real handheld computer vs a simple PDA, but pure speculation until someone can definitivly say how much flash is actually in the unit. Sure, this breaks current apps which is not a great thing, but perhaps this is a larger evolutionary leap. Of course if theres no NAND or 32megs of NAND, all bets are off and let the PalmOne roast begin.