Saying Goodbye to the Palm Treo 650

This week Palm has quietly announced the Treo 650 smartphone is no longer in production.   The announcement came in the form of a small notice at the bottom of the Treo 650 web page that read, “This device is no longer available.”   This week, we take a look back at Palm’s popular Treo and examine what worked well and how newer phones are benefiting.

Looking Back

It was back on October 25, 2004 that Palm (at that time operating under the ‘pa1mOne’ persona) introduced the Treo 650.   In the company’s press release , Ed Colligan is quoted as saying, “Today’s mobile society needs to be productive while on the go without sacrificing access to important personal and professional data. With the Treo family, customers can be even more effective and efficient because of our seamless combination of mobile phone, email, organizer, web browser and messaging.”   “Treo smartphones let people do what they want, when they want and just about anywhere they want.”

Many people viewed the Treo 650 as an evolutionary device rather than a revolutionary device.   In other words, the Treo 650 was just a technological refinement of the Treo 600.   While I agree that the 650 was a refinement of the 600, there were some important updates in that model, including:

• 320x320 hi-res display

• Redesigned button and keyboard layout

• Bluetooth short range wireless networking

• Non-volatile memory and removable battery

• Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync support

There were also some other minor refinements in the 650 such as an improved low-light digital camera, the addition of DataViz Documents To Go, and improved multimedia applications.  

Lastly, the Treo 650 was available with two different radio technologies: CDMA (Verizon and Sprint) and GSM (T-Mobile, Cingular, other carriers abroad).

Looking Ahead

If you look closely at Palm’s devices, you can see the evolutionary development of the features.   The 5-way navigation ring first appeared on the Palm Tungsten T.   It then found its way into the Treo 600.   Palm’s enhanced Personal Information Manager (PIM) applications appeared in late 2003 on the Tungsten E and T3.   Then those PIMs migrated to the Treo 650 in 2004.  

In the future we will see new technologies incorporated into the Treo family.   Volumes have been written about the desire to have Wi-Fi incorporated into Palm OS Treos.   I believe that Palm is almost ready to make this a reality.   The Wi-Fi software on the Palm TX handheld is much more stable and shows a level of product maturity that was not in the LifeDrive or the driver software provided with Palm’s Wi-Fi SD card.

Conclusion

The Palm Treo 650, having been available for two years, enjoyed a long service life.   Customers who really wanted to purchase a Treo 650 will still be able to do so for the next few weeks until inventories begin to dry up.   If you were considering the purchase of a new entry level Treo, I recommend the Treo 680.   For power users, I recommend the Treo 700p or 700wx.

The one thing that Palm keeps coming back to is the concept of mobile computing.   And in Palm’s vision, mobile computing is the new personal computing.   Over the next few years, Palm will be rolling out new products and technologies.   In 2007 Palm is expected to take the wraps of their secret third business which will make the introduction of a new kind of mobile computer.   While only a handful of people outside of Palm know what that device is, expect the lessons that have been learned from the Treo 650 will be in that device.