Palm Treo on Windows
There's a screen cap of the press conference webcast by Microsoft, Verizon and Palm (thanks Jon for the heads up). It's quite the day, Bill Gates came out himself for the event. Sort of doing a jig celebrating the fall of another territory to Microsoft's juggernaut. Add Palm to the long list of Microsoft enemies such as Lotus, Netscape, Borland, Novell, etc. who have succumbed to the Borg.
I have to say that the new Treo is actually pretty interesting for the American market - a 32 bit multi-tasking mobile operating system in a smartphone form factor sitting on top of an advanced 3G network. I've been playing with EVDO lately, and it's pretty great. For the U.S. this is definitely a first (though those in Europe and Australia, for example, have had the Nokia 6630 and 6680 UMTS 3G phones for some time). I predict this phone will be a relative success.
Amazingly, I may have missed it, but I didn't hear any questions about how badly Verizon is going to cripple this phone, as they have may of their other phones. Wonderful to see tech reporters still not getting mobility - some day maybe, but today it was a pretty easy set of questions. Oh, there was one question about the possibility of yet another Treo running on Linux, which Palm shot down. I guess that's not great news for Access/PalmSource.
Anyways, I've been saying for quite a while now that Palm is Doomed, and this looks like the final nail in the coffin no? PalmSource got bought by Access and will most likely start to shift towards a Linux-based OS, and Palm hardware is now developing Windows devices, and I'm sure will slowly fade the PalmOS into the background. No company their size can focus on two such disparate OSes, IMHO, the support and development costs will kill them. Eventually they'll have to choose one path or another, and it probably won't be the Palm Linux route.
It's a whole new ballgame now! I wonder how Palm will fare against the Motorola Q, for example... and I wonder if all those Palm Fanatic sites will cover this device? Time will tell...
-Russ