PalmOS-based Treo 700p with EVDO

Michael · Posted: Wed May 10, 2006 2:48 pm Post subject:

Engadget is reporting that 5/28/2006 is the date:
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xchpstang · Posted: Sun May 14, 2006 11:57 pm Post subject:

Just in case you missed it:

http://www.palm.com/us/products/smartphones/treo700p/index.html?creativeID=HmPg_BB|treo700p_announcement

xenophon · EVDO Addict Joined: 30 Aug 2005 Posts: 2003

No mention of carrier yet but supposedly both Sprint and Verizon generally same time. Carriers expected to announced end of month to early June.

DUN/PAM (phone-as-modem) support out of the box.

Native Word/Excel/PowerPoint and PDF viewing.

Only Bluetooth 1.2 and no native A2DP profile (but likely can be added)

Treo Central says limited support for 4GB+ SD cards, which I'm guessing refers to that there are some non-standard cards out there.

Treo Central blog...
http://treocentral.com/content/Stories/814-1.htm

____________________________________________

Operating System Palm OS® 5.4.9
Memory 128MB (60MB user accessible) non-volatile
Processor Intel® XScale™ 312MHz processor

320 x 320 color TFT touchscreen display 16-bit color displays displays up to 65,536 colors

CDMA 800/1900MHz digital dual-band

CDMA2000 EvDO network-backwards compatible with 1xRTT and IS95 networks

Bluetooth® 1.2 wireless support
Wireless

Personal speakerphone

Hands-free headset jack

Microphone mute option

TTY/TDD compatibility

3-way calling
Phone Features
1.3 megapixels with 1280x1024 resolution

Automatic light balance

2x digital zoom

Integrated self-portrait mirror

Video capture with 352 x 288 resolution

2.5mm headset jack is stereo headset compatible-requires a stereo headset adapter, sold separately, for use with standard stereo headphones

Polyphonic MIDI, MP3, WAV & video ringtones

External ringer on/off switch w/ vibrate mode
Audio
Full QWERTY key layout with backlighting

Integrated number dial pad

Keyguard feature
Keyboard

Support for MultiMediaCard, SD & SDIO cards
Expansion Slot

Removable, rechargeable lithium-ion battery

Talk time: up to 4.5 hours (compared to 5 hours on Treo 650, 4.7 hours on 700w)

Standby time: up to 300 hours (compred to 330+ hours on Treo 650)
Battery
Multi-connector on device

USB sync cable

AC adapter (108-132 VAC/60Hz)
Power/Sync
2.28" W x 5.08" H (excluding antenna) x 0.89" D

58mm W x 129mm H x 58mm D (700w - 58mm W x 113mm H x 23mm D)
Size
6.4 ounces / 180 grams (same as Treo 700w)

Weight
Windows® 2000 or Windows® XP Service Pack 2 (later versions may also be supported)

USB port (USB sync cable included)

CD-ROM drive
Windows® PC
Mac OS 10.2.4-10.4

USB port (USB sync cable included)

CD-ROM drive
Mac

xenophon · EVDO Addict Joined: 30 Aug 2005 Posts: 2003

Sprint has announced plans for Treo 700p by end of May for $399 (probably w/2yr contract).

______________

http://www2.sprint.com/mr/news_dtl.do?id=11960

Sprint (NYSE: S) today announced plans to be the first carrier to offer the Sprint Power Vision(SM) Smart Device Treo™ 700P by Palm - the latest PDA/Phone combo to deliver broadband-like download speeds of Sprint Mobile Broadband Services operating on the Sprint Power Vision Network(1). Sprint has the largest mobile broadband network of any carrier today and is expected to extend its leadership role to reach an estimated 190 million people nationwide and in Puerto Rico by year end and concurrently implement second-generation upgrades to bring additional mobility benefits to users in 1Q 2007. The Treo 700P will be available at the end of May at Sprint Stores, Sprint business channels and online at www.sprint.com at $399.99 after available discounts and promotions.

Ideal for customers who want to extend their workplace and stay connected for personal needs, the Treo 700P builds upon the success of earlier models offering enhancements in several areas including broadband-like download speeds, an enhanced Blazer Web browser and an updated Palm OS (version 5.4.9). Sprint is enabling the Treo 700p with flexible connectivity options like phone-as-modem that takes advantage of the devices capability to be used with a laptop to provide high-speed data access. Sprint is also expected to be the only wireless carrier to offer live TV capabilities - via Sprint TV - on the Treo 700P at launch.

"Sprint realizes that every business customer is also a consumer and uses mobility for productivity, social connections, entertainment and news," said Danny Bowman, vice president of product marketing for Sprint. "The Treo 700P is ideal for customers who are looking for a device that provides a combination of power and elegance to satisfy the need for owning a stylish, cutting-edge device while still helping them to be more efficient and productive."

The Treo 700P allows Sprint customers to do more in more places and provide a powerful productivity and entertainment experience. Features include:

* Support for Sprint Mobile Broadband Service on the nation's largest mobile broadband network.
* Support for Sprint TV(SM) - Emmy-award winning service providing more than 50 channels of video and audio for TV on the go, including live TV with full motion video and vivid sound.
* Support for On Demand - retrieve personalized information for local news, sports, weather, movies and more.
* Support for Sprint PCS Picture Mail(SM), Messaging, Games, Ringers, Screensavers
* Email and Web capable
* Phone as modem capability
* Palm OS organizer
* Bluetooth® Wireless technology
* 1.3 megapixel digital camera with video capabilities
* Built-in MP3 player
* Speakerphone
* 128 MB Memory - (60 MB available for end user storage)
* Enhanced attachment capabilities - Documents to Go (version 8.0) including a new PDF viewer
* Voice memo application

"The new Sprint Treo 700p delivers on Palm's commitment to provide business and mobile professionals with the tools they need to stay productive while on the road," said John Hartnett, senior vice president worldwide sales and customer relations for Palm. "The Treo 700p provides a world-class email and Web experience and, combined with Sprint's high-speed EV-DO network, gives businesses more reasons to extend their corporate information with a Treo mobile solution."

For content, the Treo 700P has access to Sprint downloadable games, ringers, screensavers and other Palm OS productivity and entertainment applications applied directly on a customer's Sprint bill. Additional content is available via the Sprint PCS Software Store provided by Handango™, an intelligent on-device catalog of applications and digital media, allowing users to find, download and buy software, games, ringtones, graphics and other applications simply and securely. The store can also be visited online at http://sprint.handango.com.

For complete details on the Treo700P, visit http://www.sprint.com/treo.

Sprint customers can currently use several devices on the Sprint Power Vision Network to access various audio, video and data applications at average download speeds of 400-700 kbps and peak speeds up to 2Mbps(2). Sprint today has the most wireless broadband coverage of any carrier. The Sprint Power Vision Network now covers more than 150 million people and services customers in 220 major metropolitan areas as well as 470 airports across the nation, the most of any carrier. The Sprint Power Vision Network is expected to reach an estimated 190 million people nationwide by the end of the year.

xenophon · EVDO Addict Joined: 30 Aug 2005 Posts: 2003

Nice review in NY Times...
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/18/technology/18pogue.html?ex=1148097600&en=633f8e217060d2ec&ei=5087%0A

May 18, 2006
David Pogue
May's Treo Leapfrogs Past January's
THE electronics industry operates like a very expensive game of leapfrog. You buy something in April, and then a newer, faster, less expensive version comes out in May. Rats!

On the other hand, you might get lucky; you might not buy in until the better version comes along. There you sit on the train, on the plane or at the baseball field, smugly looking over at the poor saps who bought last month's phone, music player or camera.

If you've been shopping for a smartphone — a multipurpose cellphone with Tic-Tac keys for tapping out e-mail — the game is picking up speed. This week, Palm unveiled the latest model of its popular Treo phone, only four months after the previous one.

The Treo has found a special place in the hearts of the upwardly technical. It offers a beautiful phone that fits sweetly in your hand, displays photos on a big, bright touch screen, does e-mail and Web browsing just about as well as a cellphone can — and doubles as a Palm organizer, effortlessly synchronizing its calendar, address book and Microsoft Office documents with your Mac or PC.

All-in-one gadgets rarely do any single job as well as a dedicated one (think scanner-printer-fax machines or camera-music players). But the Treo has always come deliciously close.

Somehow, Palm has managed to pack into it a BlackBerry-style keyboard (brightly illuminated, at that); a physical switch that silences all sounds (which, as the overture begins, you can hit without even taking the thing out of your pocket); a built-in digital camera; a voice-memo button that can also record phone calls (which is great to have when someone starts rattling off driving directions over the phone); a slot for an SD memory card (to hold more music, photos and videos); a removable battery (4.5 hours of talk time, 300 hours standby); and a five-way rocker switch that lets you operate most functions with one hand.

Somehow, all of this works together without becoming a train wreck of complexity.

In January, Palm released a new model called the Treo 700W, which shall henceforth be known as the Blessing/Curse Upgrade. This model was even sleeker (2.3 by 4.4 by 0.9 inches), faster (312 megahertz) and more capacious (60 megabytes of free memory). More important, it brought sunshine into the lives of business travelers by hopping onto Verizon's and Sprint's superfast cellular networks (known as EV-DO). For a price, you could do your Internet duties at something approaching cable-modem speeds.

The 700W also introduced a better, higher-resolution camera (1.3 megapixels), dedicated Talk and End buttons, and even more refined domed key shapes that are easier to hit with flailing thumbs.

The curse is that instead of the efficient, refined Palm operating system, this model ran a mobile version of Windows.

Cramming Windows into a Treo was calculated to turn the heads of corporate buyers whose motto is, "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft."

But from an elegance standpoint, it was a bizarre move. On the 700W, rough spots and design mismatches stuck out like a handful of sore thumbs. There was an OK button that actually meant Cancel, and a Start menu that fit only seven programs. The date book permitted appointments to begin only on the half-hour; the Calendar and Address Book buttons were replaced by menu commands (which required more taps to operate); and the on-screen Mute and Speakerphone buttons were hidden in pop-up menus.

WHAT connoisseurs of good design really wanted, of course, was a phone with the modernized hardware of the 700W but with the more logical Palm operating system.

Good things come to those who wait. The 700P is the Windows Treo without the Windows, and it's almost everything you'd wish it to be.

That is, it offers all the same hardware perks of the Windows Treo — the high-speed Internet, better keyboard, Talk and End keys, sharper camera, improved specs — while sticking to the more efficient Palm operating system.

Here's the Home button, back where it belongs; one press takes you to a complete list of every program on the machine. (And here's the optional list view, absent on the Windows version, which lets you see 22 programs at a time without scrolling.)

Here, too, is Palm's Blazer browser, which blasts Web pages onto the screen much faster than the 700W's Internet Explorer; if you've signed up for the high-speed Internet service, then streaming radio, music and video clips are a joy.

And here, praise be, is the bright, 320-by-320-pixel touch screen that the Treo used to have — not the 240-by-240 one on the Windows version.

In some ways, in fact, the 700P leapfrogs past the 700W and offers a few nice touches all its own.

For example, the slide-show, movie-playing and audio-playing programs all have a consistent, modern look. Not that you're likely to choose a phone based on its slide-show software, but you can now attach a voice comment to each slide, if you so desire.

The Palm's miniature copy of Microsoft Office, called Documents to Go, is now burned right into the Treo's circuitry so that it no longer eats into the 60 megabytes of free memory that's available for your use. You can open Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF documents, even when they're sent as e-mail attachments.

Far more important, the 700P and its first carriers (Sprint and Verizon) have embraced the miracle known as dial-up networking. That's the feature, often frowned on by the carriers, that lets your laptop get online over the phone's high-speed connection.

You can connect the laptop to the Treo either with a cable (Windows only) or wirelessly, using a Bluetooth connection (Mac or Windows). In that case, the phone remains in your pocket, invisibly treating your laptop to high-speed e-mail, chat and Web service.

Some have knocked the Treo 700 family for its lack of Wi-Fi wireless networking; the 700P doesn't even accept Palm's $100 Wi-Fi card. Then again, if you can get online through the high-speed cellular network in hundreds of big cities, why limit yourself to scattered hot spots here and there?

The 700P is so capable, elegant and satisfying to use that it's likely to make more people than ever ask: "Should I get the Treo or the BlackBerry?"

Both devices work with e-mail, both personal and corporate. (The new Treo comes with presets for AOL, Gmail, Earthlink, Apple .Mac, Hotmail, Yahoo, Exchange ActiveSync and many e-mail services.) But the BlackBerry doesn't take movies or photos, doesn't have a touch screen and has no library of 10,000 add-on programs — from tip calculators to subway maps — as the Treo does. (That's precisely why corporate technical managers love it; a closed system is simpler to troubleshoot.)

If you ultimately opt for the Treo 700P, go download a shareware scientific calculator for it. You'll need one to figure out how much all of this goodness will cost you.

The Sprint version costs $550 or $400, depending on whether you sign up for a one- or two-year contract. Unlimited high-speed EV-DO service starts at $15 a month, including a TV channel and a Sirius satellite radio channel (not including the price of a voice plan). Unfortunately, that doesn't include using the Treo to get your laptop online, which costs another $40 a month.

Verizon's version of the 700P costs $400, after rebate, when bought with a service package, like $110 a month for 1,350 minutes of talking and unlimited high-speed Internet. Here again, the dial-up networking for your laptop costs extra: $15 a month.

(Don't forget to leave $140 in the budget for inMotion's tabletop stereo speaker system/Treo dock. The Treo slips into it, the better to pump out your music collection as it recharges—and when a call comes in, the music stops and the device turns into a crystal-clear speakerphone. Cool.)

So what's the downside of the new Treo? It's expensive, of course. And because it works on the Sprint and Verizon networks, it doesn't work overseas. (If history is any guide, a Treo 700P designed for Cingular and T-Mobile will appear later in the year. Those are the G.S.M. networks, the European standard.)

Otherwise, the new Treo itself is a joy — a communicator with immense power and potential whose software is a help instead of a hindrance. If you've held off on a smartphone until now, congratulations; you've played this game of high-tech leapfrog like a pro.

Iceman · Posted: Thu May 18, 2006 11:28 am Post subject:

This is a pretty impressive device. Only thing is, it becomes obsolete when EVDO Rev A is rolled out. How many months away is that?

xenophon · EVDO Addict Joined: 30 Aug 2005 Posts: 2003

I've thought about that too. But for all practical purposes, it probably only matters if you intend to do USB PAM a great deal. Rev 0 specs are good enough for in-phone data use or Bluetooth PAM.

According to CNET, Bluetooth PAM (phone-as-modem) can be done on the basic $15/month PowerVision acct but if doing USB, it would need the $40 PAM. If you are a heavy PAM user and require it for business, it would probably make sense to just get a Rev A laptop card along with phone. You can't talk on phone at same time doing PAM anyway so this might be the way to go.

Hopefully the next gen Rev A phones will allow talking and doing PAM at same time (either via VoIP or dual ESN chipsets).

Iceman · Posted: Thu May 18, 2006 11:59 am Post subject:

My laptop is luggable, not really portable. I want a mobile device that I can use to surf the web for directions, movie times, music videos, etc. I'm really not satisfied with the HTC Apache for this. Web pages take too long to load. I probably need to check out the alternatives to PIE.

The 700p's bigger screen and simpler UI is really appealing to me. It's just that I hate the thought of buying the last new EVDO Rev 0 device. Laughing

xenophon · EVDO Addict Joined: 30 Aug 2005 Posts: 2003

The 700p is now for sale.

http://web.palm.com/products/smartphones/treo700p/

Expected ship dates...
Sprint Treo 700p Expected to ship in 1 week
Verizon Wireless Treo 700p Expected to ship in 3-4 weeks

Michael · Posted: Tue May 23, 2006 8:16 am Post subject:

xenophon · EVDO Addict Joined: 30 Aug 2005 Posts: 2003

It's funny that Sprint was claiming to be first with 700p and Verizon trumps them by allowing orders first. Over on TreoCentral, they are saying Verizon is taking orders first but Sprint is ultimately shipping before Verizon. Doesn't matter, both are offering at about same time but is amusing what Verizon did.

Verizon's plans look a little more compelling than the past. They are bundling the data with voice plan, which is more comparable to Sprint's data/voice combined plans. In the past, Verizon was $45/month just for in-phone data on PDAs. This looks much better for a free incoming call plan including in-phone data. Now if Verizon could get EVDO in more markets and catchup with Sprint.

Be aware if ordering on the phone. Some are reporting that they attempted to order a 700p but the rep was confused and sold them a 700w. I imagine that confusion will be significant long term. Two completely different phones with nearly same model. Maybe Palm should've called it the 710p.

xenophon · EVDO Addict Joined: 30 Aug 2005 Posts: 2003

Many on treocentral.com are reporting that they have the 700p, both Sprint and Verizon. Verizon people received it from online ordering, Sprint people got them at stores, but only a few stores have them and more to trickle in over next couple weeks. Sounds like all Sprint stores will have them first week of June. Palm's online store is also taking orders and is shipping.

Generally positive feedback from those who upgraded from 650. Browser speed (up to 500Kbps usually) not up to par with Windows Mobile (up to ~1Mbps) but for the small screen size, still reported to be snappy and adequate for streaming video/audio. USB DUN is still be capable of 1Mbps+, Bluetooth DUN of course can only do about 300Kbps (Mac can only do BT currently). Some 4GB SD cards do work - A-DATA for one, which is under $100.

Hoping to have one in a couple weeks, have to wait to procure through work. Me thinks this phone is only for power users though. You can now get a Treo 650 for under $200. If you use EVDO in-phone, 1.3Mpix cam and >2GB card support, it runs $200 more for the 700p.

Michael · Posted: Sun May 28, 2006 4:53 pm Post subject:

xenophon · EVDO Addict Joined: 30 Aug 2005 Posts: 2003

A lot of treocentral 700p users are reporting that Orb works great with the Blazer browser. If you don't know what Orb is, allows you to setup a media server on home PC and access TV, webcams and all of your media, streaming realtime. And it's free (open source?).

Can test here w/out having to setup a server.
http://test.orb.com/streamtest/home.jsp

xenophon · EVDO Addict Joined: 30 Aug 2005 Posts: 2003

I've got a Sprint 700p and have been testing downloads and streaming performance. There is a clear bottleneck in either Blazer or in PalmOS as the browser simply cannot go above 400-500Kbps, even when my S620 laptop card can do 1.4Mbps sitting next to it. On the small screen this is not much of an issue as the 'expierence' of browsing is still pretty good. Many 700p users on treocentral have also reported this, Sprint or Verizon.

I haven't done any USB tethering test yet. Hope to by tomorrw.

There is a problem with video streaming at times. With Orb and 3GP formats, a 128Kbps video stream works pretty well. But a 100Kbps Windows Media Video stream barely works, with some skipping. Sprint-sponsored video content works fine but is at very lower bit rates, so looks a little grainy.

All streaming audio tests that I've done work very well with no skipping.

Part of the issues of Blazer/WMV streaming could be the lower EVDO performance but methinks it could be the limitation of PalmOS multitasking - dealing with network traffic while rendering browser or video at the same time.

Every other aspect of the phone is great, a big improvement over Treo 650. I particuarly like the 4GB SD card capability and improved camera.

More later...