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Talkin' Treo


Fri Feb 24, 2006 - 6:09 PM EST - By Annie Latham

Week ending February 24

End of the Line for BlackBerry?

This has got to be one of the most highly anticipated court decisions to date. On Friday, February 24, U.S. District Judge James Spencer will hear arguments from Research In Motion (RIM), which makes the BlackBerry, and NTP, the patent holding firm. At stake—the shutdown of the BlackBerry wireless email service, which will impact 3.2 million U.S. customers.

There is belief that a patent ruling issued on Wednesday will work in RIM’s favor.

For sure, Palm is poised to welcome BlackBerry users with open arms.

Treo 650 Community is Talkin’

I guess in a way, the following stories are well-timed for anyone pondering BlackBerry alternatives.

Over at PC World, contributing editor, James Martin has written about using the Treo as a notebook alternative. That was a big part of the Palm 700w Roadshow that I discussed last week. The difference here is that James is using a Treo 650. He explains that since the Treo 650 has been available since fall of 2004, there are a lot more readers who would be interested in knowing if their smartphone would make a reasonable notebook PC substitute. He tackles e-mail right away and has a great comparison between VersaMail and the BlackBerry service. This article is part 1 of a series.

Over at Mobilitysite.com, Chris Leckness is writing a series about giving the Treo 650 a chance over other Windows Mobile devices. Check out the story and the posted remarks. You can learn a lot.

This last piece from Forbes is kind of fun. Nothing like hearing directly from a user how much he loves the Treo 650. That user happens to be the CEO of Metastorm, the leading provider of business process management (BPM) software for automating, managing and controlling processes. Very cool.

Palm News

On Thursday, February 23, Ed Colligan, Palm’s president and CEO, participated in "In Conversation With" hosted by Mike Abramsky, director, Global Equity Software and Wireless Global Research for RBC Capital Markets. The audio webcast is available for 30 days.

The day before, February 22, Palm’s general manager and vice president, Canada and Latin America participated in the Wireless Data Panel at the RBC Capital Markets 10th Annual Communications, Media and Technology Conference. The audio webcast is available for 30 days.

Ryan over at PalmInfocenter.com discovered an interesting gem in the Google Video vault—a lecture that features Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan talking about the launching Palm Computing. It took place at the Computer History Museum back in 2002.

Warning: You’ll need to block some time for viewing this. The running time is 1 hour 25 minutes.

Elsewhere in the world of Palm…

This week, VoiceIt Technologies, LLC announced that they are now offering a new release of VoiceNavIt™ for the Palm Treo 600™, 650™ Smartphone and Palm LifeDrive™ mobile manager.

Per the announcement:

VoiceNavIt is the most versatile, powerful, and timesaving application provided for PC, PDA, and Smartphone devices. This simple to Use Voice Command and Control application with macro recording and playback allows you to automate your most common tasks with your voice command for the utmost in convenience. Just a simple voice command can retrieve your emails, create new tasks, open your calendar and switch between views, take - save – send a picture, launch your favorite PalmOS application and much, much more. The possibilities are as endless as your imagination.

And Chapura, Inc., an innovator of synchronization technology, announced the availability of an upgrade to its popular Outlook synchronization software, PocketMirror®.

Version 4.0 of PocketMirror now includes many productivity enhancement features for synchronizing Microsoft Outlook Contacts, Calendar, Tasks and Notes with the built-in personal information manager (PIM) software built into Palm OS devices.

There are some recent product reviews of note.

The Core Pocket Media Player (TCPMP), a FREE stand-alone audio and video media player for both the PalmOS and Windows Mobile platforms, plays almost every format of video file in the known universe.

If you want to learn about one of the most popular third-party launchers in the Palm world—zLauncher, Everything Treo has just written a review of it.

If you are looking for a sound fix, for your Treo or other portable devices, check out the ThinkOutside Boomtube H201 speaker system review by Harv Laser.

I Want My MobiTV – Part 3: Is it Live or is It…?

I will surely miss MobiTV’s NBC’s Mobile Olympics. The clips of medal winning performances have been fun to watch… PLUS, I know they aren’t live so my expectations have been properly managed. When it comes to some of the other channels, it was head scratching time.

I finally figured out that the FOX Sports Channel is really a compilation of feeds from the various regional FOX channels. That explains why I was learning a whole bunch about the Pittsburg Pirates and the Atlanta Braves when I live in Oakland A’s/SF Giants territory (FOX Bay Area).

I also discovered that TLC and the Discovery Channels were showing the East Coast feeds of their programs. This puzzled me since MobiTV is based in Emeryville, California. Oh well.

For those of you into national politics and public affairs, the C-SPAN channel is live. For the most part, MSNBC and CNBC are also live (though with the Olympics this week, their schedules were a bit off at times, but the news was current).

So I’d guess you could call it “sort of live.” For sure, it is pretty amazing how well the video streams into my Treo 650.

Here’s a complete listing of channels currently available for the Treo.