Palm Treo 700w Review

Palm’s line of Treo Smartphones has been widely praised since the first model was introduced, and while the Treo’s popularity has only grown with the passage of time, the same cannot be said for the Treo’s operating system, the Palm OS. During the Treo’s rise to popularity, Microsoft’s competing handheld OS, Windows Mobile, has become more favored and more widely used than ever before, a development that has pushed many away from Palm brand products and toward manufacturers willing to produce Windows Mobile devices.

Now, for the first time, and in a move that shocked many onlookers, Palm has put Windows Mobile on one of its handhelds. That handheld is the Treo 700w, the first Palm device to run any operating system other than Palm OS. It was Palm’s hope that a marriage of their popular and recognizable Treo with the increasingly favored Windows Mobile OS would make for an attractive mixture. They were right.

It’s hard to read a story about the Treo 700w without a few paragraphs concerning its running of Windows Mobile 5, and for good reason. What makes the 700w so desirable to so many consumers is the Windows Mobile platform, offering the first chance for fans of both the Treo and the Windows Mobile platform to find the two in one place. While Mac users will certainly be left out in the cold (as they have often been with other Palm products), the availability of a Windows Mobile Treo is a very welcome sight.

Because of the Treo’s history and its newfangled Windows Mobile workings, it’s difficult to know whether the 700w should be called a Pocket PC Phone or a smartphone. In the continuum between smartphone and PDA phone, the Treo 700w falls somewhere in the middle, and while arguments can be made that the unit is more PDA than smartphone or vice versa, everyone involved with the product considers it a smartphone, so we’ll acquiesce (although it is technically a Pocket PC Phone).

The 700w “smartphone” is powered by a 312MHz Intel XScale processor and contains a 128MB flash memory chip, of which approximately 66MB is free to the end user. Other features include a 240x240 color display, a full QWERTY thumb keyboard, onboard Bluetooth wireless, an SDIO-ready Secure Digital card slot, EV-DO high-speed wireless compatibility, an Infrared data port and a rechargeable, replaceable Lithium-Ion battery

...................................

Palm Life Drive

Over the last few years we've seen PDAs evolve into more media friendly devices. While some PDA purists will tell you that PDAs were meant to be productive and not iPods, consumers want more choices and they want them in as few devices as possible. That's where the Palm Lifedrive comes in. While Palm calls their other devices handhelds, the LifeDrive is appropriately called a Mobile Manager. So what makes the LifeDrive so special? Follow us as we tell you more.
What Makes the LifeDrive so Special?
When you first see the Palm LifeDrive Mobile Manager, you realize this isn't your typical PDA. In fact, with all of the focus of promoting the LifeDrive as an entertainment device, you may wonder if Palm sacrificed on the PDA features. We'll talk about the "PDA-ness" of the Lifedrive in a minute but let's first talk about the hardware. For starters, the LifeDrive is the first PDA released in the US that uses a hard drive istead of flash memory for storage. What that means is that while the typical PDA might have 32 to 64MB of storage capacity, the LifeDrive gives you 4GB of storage.

Besides the massive storage capabilities, Palm also went all the way by including both 802.11b and Bluetooth wireless. For you long-time Palm users, you realize that Palm's embracing wireless to this extent is probably a bigger deal than the inclusion of a hard drive. We'll talk more about these innovations but first we'll start with the complete specifications.

Microdrive
The heart of the LifeDrive is a 4GB(3.85GB of usable storage) Hitachi Microdrive which is smaller than a matchbook. Microdrives are extremely reliable and aren't new to PDA Power users. Personally I've used a 1GB Compact Flash Microdrive on my PDA for several years with no issues.

For detailed info and specifications, click here...................................

T-Mobile gets official about new HTC-made phones

T-Mobile by now has been usually lax about selling unlocked phones, so many people were buying T-Mobile-branded HTC-manufactured Windows Mobile phones and using them with other operators. This time HTC is once again on the forefront when it comes to HTC phones and surely their offering may be appealing not just to T-Mobile customers…


Yesterday there was a press conference in Munich, Germany where T-Mobile introduced new HTC phones: T-Mobile MDA compact IV (pictured above, a version of HTC Touch Diamond), T-Mobile MDA Vario IV (with QWERTY keyboard) and the new 16GB Ameo (a version of HTC Advantage).








Today T-Mobile has published a story about this announcement, unfortunately only in German (yet) so here are highlights translated to English:

• release date for T-Mobile MDA compact IV is July 2008 - all over Europe (where T-Mobile has divisions)
• T-Mobile underlines the following features in MDA compact IV: 3D-touch-screen, 4GB internal memory and 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus
• T-Mobile MDA Vario IV - the one with keyboard - is coming late sommer, i.e. at first MDA Compact IV will be released
• T-Mobile confirms that MDA Compact IV has HSUPA for fast uploads!
• T-Mobile Ameo 16GB is coming to market in June 2008

Detail info.

E-TEN Shows Affordable Glofiish X610 Smartphone

Today E-TEN announced its latest affordable addition to its Glofiish lineup of Windows Mobile Professional powered smartphones, the X610. Like the DX900 and X900 that it was launched with today at the Computex 2008 show in Taiwan, the X610 makes use of E-TEN’s new 3D animated finger user interface - seen below.

E-TEN’s new finger touch UI extensions, which we first saw under NDA at the 2008 Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, have an HTC TouchFLO-like appearance and provide users with 3D effects and large, finger-friendly buttons and icons to make it easier to control the X610 one-handedly, without the need for a stylus (which is still included). We haven’t seen the final version of the software, but what we saw in February looked promising.

Details on the X610 are otherwise a bit sparse, other than the fact that it has a built-in GPS module, but the device does seem to be the obvious successor to the X600, a smartphone equipped with a QVGA touchscreen display and quad-band GSM/EDGE network support. One thing is certain, though, the X610 runs the latest version of the Windows Mobile Professional OS: 6.1.

The X610 can be seen now through June 7th at the Computex show in Taipei, Taiwan. E-TEN has not provided an estimated availability date or price for the x610 as of this moment, and we are still waiting on full specs.

Detail Info

HTC Advantage X7510

The HTC Advantage is a tweener: it's not a UMPC like the HTC Shift and Fujitsu U810 because it doesn't run a full version of Windows. It's not a smartphone because it's too large to hold to the head, and in fact you can only use it for phone conversations with the included wired headset, built-in speakerphone or a Bluetooth headset. And it's not the first handheld computer with the Advantage name: HTC launched the Advantage X7500 last spring and the US version X7501 in mid-summer 2007. So now you know what it's not...

The HTC Advantage X7510 is nonetheless many things. It's a powerful handheld computer running Windows Mobile Pro with a 5" VGA touch screen, detachable keyboard, unlocked quad band GSM phone with triband HSDPA, WiFi, Bluetooth 2.0, a 3MP autofocus camera, a 624MHZ processor and 16 gigs of storage. It's the update with a new keyboard design, double the storage, Windows Mobile 6.1 and the amazing Opera 9.5 web browser that's not yet available for any other device besides HTC's own Touch Diamond. It's a GPS. The Advantage is a laptop replacement for those who don't need Windows XP or Vista specific programs: it has mobile versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Internet Explorer, Outlook and more. And with WAN, LAN and PAN (that's cellular, WiFi and Bluetooth in English) connections, the Advantage is perfect for those who need to stay connected wherever they go. Though large for a phone or even PDA, it's tiny by even UMPC standards and weighs just over 13 ounces (a few 10th of an ounce heavier than the first generation Advantage).

Because relatively little has changed with the X7510, we won't do a detailed review. Please read our original Advantage review for all the gory details. Sadly, because of the Qualcomm lawsuit and injunction, the Advantage X7510 will not be sold in the US. This has nothing to do directly with HTC, but rather Qualcomm filed suit to have certain chips and mobile CPUs blocked for sale in the US and the X7510 got caught in that mess. Though its CPU and chipset are no different from the US X7501 that shipped last summer, the X7501 was cleared for US sale because it already received the green light before the embargo began. A shame really, but you'll have to buy the X7510 from online importers, of which there are many.