Exclusive Pics of the Palm Treo 850
92 comments
Filed in Exclusives, Handsets, Palm
Ahh Wednesdays. Is the first half of the week over or is the second half of the week beginning? Optimist or pessimist, here at BGR we’re doing our part to make today as painless as possible. How about we start out with an exclusive dose of some live shots of the Palm Treo 850! Truth be told, this puppy is pretty smooth looking! Details are still coming in but we can tell you it’s sporting a 400 MHz processor and 100 MB of RAM. Hit the jump for a nice comparison pic with the BlackBerry 8800.
[Thanks, Anonymous]
Had a Curve 8310 for about 2 days…lack of 3G and the need for “shortcuts” to simple keyboard usage was a killer.
Oh well - stay on topic.
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@Jas - 3G is a matter of network which you were well aware of when you tried the 8310.
Shortcuts like holding down a letter key for a half-second to produce a CAP? I’m sure there is some buggy-as-hell 3rd-party WM software that cures that ill, though. Palm certainly hasn’t entertained the notion.
Oh well, indeed.
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How on Earth are people liking THE LOOKS of this device??
Am I the only one seeing the square screen, the huge real estate between the screen and the qwerty keypad? Aren’t the 4 middle buttons a bit too…BIG?
755 easily looks better.
Regardless, this design looks 3-4 years old. The only positive mentions would be the connect/disconnect buttons.
It ultimately LOOKS as if it emerged from a different age, when compared to RIM’s handset.
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Man….every time, they move the main menu buttons around. At least they figured out the keyboard. I have had a palm since their original palm pilot. Still have it on my desk. It is very annoying how they keep messing with the buttons. Example, I have 650, my wife has 755. Just to hit the menu button to say, copying and paste something, I have to look around on hers to find it. I shouldn’t even have to look. They even mess with the shapes.
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Gauntlet Down said: An easy Google for “Handspring Rim keyboard” and maybe “settlement” will turn up the 2002 history of the keyboard litigation.
The patent(s) RIM has cover a lot of things but the UNIQUE part was the curve of the keyboard (and is in the 2002 patent) - http://tinyurl.com/4s5hbn
Right you are, Gauntlet! Sorry, “Mal”, but you cannot patent a concept! Guess how the USPTO views “front-facing”, “smile pattern”, or “concave”?
All Palm has to do is change the specific radius of the concave by a single degree and they have their own useful and unique offering. Sucks to be Palm.
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@Gauntlet,
Great job.
Now explain why RIM went after Handspring and Palm in *2002* when the first “smile” keyboard from Palm was on the Treo 650 in 2004.
Treo 180, 270 and 600 do not have smile keyboards (if anything, they are frowns)yet RIM went after Handspring and Palm.
http://www.the-gadgeteer.com/assets/treo180-10.jpg
http://www.brighthand.com/images/tungsten_w_keyboard.gif
I await your response, genius.
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Edit:
I meant Treo 180, 270, 300 and 600.
First smile KB was the Treo 650.
Point still stands: no smile kb in 2002 from Palm/Handspring.
This is dumb. Hit me up at WMExperts if you want to throw down on this topic.
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Nothing preventing Palm from doing whatever they wish with a “smile” or “inverted smile” in 2008, as long as they don’t copy RIM’s patented radius. Not_Rocket_Science! If only they could afford a decent patent attorney. _That’s_ the only dumb thing about it.
You and little Jimmy’s egos take up all the room, yet suck all the air out of your sandbox at WMExperts.
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i have a blackberry and i didnt know if i pressed the space bar twice it would produce a period and i feel like i am of reasonable intelligence… so be nice.
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backbeat,
“Nothing preventing Palm from doing whatever they wish with a “smile” or “inverted smile” in 2008, as long as they don’t copy RIM’s patented radius.”
Err, so you’re saying I’m right, the “smile” has nothing to do with it.
Thanks for backing me up.
(Btw, who’s “Jimmy” and why would I care what you think about WMExperts? Boo hoo.)
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I’ve not been a big fan of Palm devices in the past, but this one shows some real promise.
http://www.PalmTreo850.net
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Mal: Read more. Pontificate less.
A “smile”, as you’ve used the term, is nonpatentable, as is a forward-facing keyboard, and the remainder of your bs claims. Just as stupidity is nonpatentable, you and Jimbo can (due to your self-inflated egos) own the market (unlike Palm).
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I love the look of this phone. And I will admit to being a huge Windows Treo Fanboy. But here is what I don’t get. Everyone bashes the Treo for the design, but what exactly has changed about the Blackberry. I honestly can’t tell the difference when I look at any of the models. I don’t get it. They all look the same to me. It comes down to Palm is the only one that has every gotten a WM Professional with Front Facing Keyboard remotely right. I prefer WM over the BB. So a Treo it is. But I certainly don’t see the BB as having revolutionary designs. Thats a joke.
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It has everything you may want.. I got to play with one, it looks a lot better in person.. slick, cool, iPhone like glossy black..
1. 3G
2. quad gsm (like all Treo)
3. wifi (works well)
4. gps (work ok)
5. touch-screen (like all treo)
6. Bluetooth
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Can you please find an image of a phone from 3-4 years ago that looks like this?
Instead of the group of you claiming the phone looks so “2 years” ago find a smartphone that actually looked this good and was usable an post the images.
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@ ‘Me’:
No one was so down on their financial luck as to design a phone this sad 3-4 years ago.
The ‘newest’ design element on this 850 is a rip from Nokia’s newer N-series phones where the function keys are positioned, especially the Red/Green phone buttons. All else in this 850 design is _very_ Centro-cheap-esque. A cheap retread of a cheap retread.
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@Mal:
Still lacking a clue regarding how a patent is defined, eh, shortstuff? The good news? You’ll be quite safe in life, as you’ll never have intellectual property to protect from those too lacking in creativity to develop themselves. Therefore, your incestuous relationship with Palm can continue unabated.
Peace.
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Ugh… If this is the best they can do then forget it.
My wife and I plan to dump our Treos this October and we don’t plan on looking back.
Dear Palm: If you ever get out of 1998 let us know.
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DO YOU REALLY THINK PALM CARES ABOUT WHAT LOYALIST THINK????
They just sold over 1 million Centros! They could care less that we think it’s ugly. Their focus is obviously NEW customers. This device would capture many Dash and Centro enthusiast. I’m more concern with the features than the design.
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Dude, what the f**k? Every week, just another ugly-ass handset that does nothing new and can burn in hell that Sprint is most likely going to pick up.
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Certainly looks less fugly than the HTC Iris s640, for the HTC fanboys in the theatre. Not only is it smaller, but it runs Pro–go figure.
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“Every week, just another ugly-ass handset that does nothing new”
Ok, so what do you want new. A fold out spoon or something. This adds almost everything anyone would possibly want to the the Treo line.
“But I certainly don’t see the BB as having revolutionary designs. Thats a joke.”
Exactly. I love all the design experts out there. Ummm.. The Bold is so revolutionary.. but wait.. it looks like a Q9m that they put the iPhone chrome ring around, REVOLUTIONARY! And the iPhone is an obvious rip-off of the Dell X50v circa 2004…. So tell me, what does 2008 look like??
This phone looks great, and has the goods!
“They just sold over 1 million Centros! They could care less that we think it’s ugly. Their focus is obviously NEW customers.”
I think its more a combination of both, and it appears with the features and looks it will do it pretty well. But true, Im sure they could care less of the few people that are expecting some radical but non functional HIP design to replace their treo line.
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@bird(of-a)feather who said: “This adds almost everything anyone would possibly want to the the Treo line.”
A company in Palm’s financial and market position who makes nano-sized, incremental improvements (or at worst, retreads of old hardware design specs) is akin to an engine with a slow oil leak … or to put it in clinical terms, is slowing bleeding out. The end result is the same. Death.
To continue sporting the same tired candybar formfactor, while praying to the stock-gods that WM will enable Palm to sell product to corporations/governments, coupled with low-resolution 2.6″ screens (yes, 320×320 is low resolution in today’s market) is the very recipe for rigor mortis. Either Palm is so aggregiously arrogant that they believe they can dictate to the market what it needs … OR … Palm is performing their own economic crashcode with only enough voltage to regain another faint pulse. If within 1 more year Bono and partners have not kicked Palm into high-gear with relatively revolutionary improvements that can keep pace with the real market, _as it exists_, I’ll be booking my tickets for the corporate office firesale. My office could use some more $25 Leap chairs!
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“To continue sporting the same tired candybar formfactor, while praying to the stock-gods that WM will enable Palm to sell product to corporations/governments, coupled with low-resolution 2.6″ screens (yes, 320×320 is low resolution in today’s market) is the very recipe for rigor mortis.”
See but somehow that same form factor is more ideally suited for business/email/texting platforms and somehow by making incremental changes they can still sell a million of em with the Centro. So now give everyone a laundry list of what we have been asking for on this device for as long as I can remember and make it look fresh, and you are gonna sell a lot of phones, whether your brilliant opinion agrees. Otherwise how does RIM keep turning out these same tired candybar style phones with nano-sized incremental improvements and keep selling their phones too…. Pack it in RIM.. Here comes your Firesale.
Give us a 320×320 screeen(which Im sorry isnt that small compared to the size of the screen EVEN in this market. Though Im glad you’re one to use devices that are coming in 5 months to justify ‘todays’ market. 480×480 at this form factor is not going to blow us away, costs more, and costs battery life.. No Thanks. If you go by the iPhone for the screen size the resolution is real close at 320×320 vs 320×480 but you require much more screen and no keyboard(something a lot of us dont want).
I love that they add WiFi, GPS, more resolution, more memory, RevA, a faster more power efficent OS, bigger processor, make it look fresh, and somehow it labeled incremental improvements. And we dont even know by what we know now if their software team has been busy. They were the first to add some good software additions to WM, maybe theyve keep going….
But Id love to hear some of you experts spew off what it should have…
640×640 2.5″ screen.. Keyboard the size of Rhode Island. 1000Gigs of flash. And make the case out of pure Platinum and Gold. But keep it skinny and light with a 500mAh battery please. We want something awesome and Revolutionary thats usable for 7 minutes.
There are no cutting edge design specs for this form factor. And whether you like it or not, MILLIONS of us want this form factor and MILLIONS more that are still in feature phone land, will too….
Now nobody you seem to want to argue with doesnt agree Palm needs to explore other form factors and come up with more!!! But they needed to shore up the new treos first and give us what we wanted, and they are doing just that! You have brilliant business sense if you couldnt see that….
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And despite all the perfectly timed, perfectly executed design updates, and selling kabillions of units, PALM is a *SELL*? Keep bucketing that water, Oh Cap’n of the Titanic!
WiFi? 2 years to late to matter vs the rest of the market.
GPS is *a*-GPS, relying on triangulating cell towers to get you within 0.33 mile of your destination. R&D couldn’t be bothered with a real GPS receiver? There goes the real market right by Palm again.
More memory? At the cost of memory, BFD and still 2-3 years too late to matter in the real market.
More resolution has been available since WM *5*, again, making Palm 2 years late to market.
Rev-A? Solely a CDMA network matter. Will DT continue Sprint’s losing streak?
Sucks to be Palm … or a Palm shareholder.
As for RIM, they’re able to develop and diversify in the matter of a year. 12 months to provide *2* completely new formfactors while retaining their rock-solid foundation.
It’s not about one company versus another, in a generic argument sense. It’s about the cost and benefit of market performance.
Palm is a solid *SELL*.
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