It's phone different Mike's turn to take the Palm Treo 680 for a spin this time in the Round Robin. The 680 is certainly no stranger to Mike since he bought one awhile back. I knew that he'd switched over to the iPhone when it came out, but I didn't know the reason behind his not having his 680 anymore until I read his 680 thoughts today.
I reviewed the Treo 680 before as a writer for TreoCentral, and as far as I know, it's in the top five of the TreoCentral page views to this day. I reviewed the 680 (Graphite) and then promptly went out and bought one (orange). I then handed off the trusty 650 to my wife, and that was the way things were until I bought an iPhone. Some crafty thief broke into her car to get her 650, and I then handed my trusty orange 680 off to my wife and focused on the iPhone and our site for it, phonedifferent.com. I didn't intend to look back, but that's more or less what I've been doing for the past few days with the Treo 680: reminiscing.
Well, that reason sure was a bummer. I'm sure Mike's wife is enjoying the 680 though and I know that Mike loves his iPhone.
Mike says that the Treo is in many ways the closest of all of the phones we'll review to the iPhone. He also lets us know that iPhone owners were 7 times more likely to have used a Treo (or Sidekick) than any other phone. I didn't know that. Very interesting.
So Mike takes a journey down memory lane with the Treo 680. As he looks at the 680 all over again, he sees that even though the Palm OS is still that platform that makes things easy, it isn't really going anywhere because Palm is working on their Linux phone.
Palm will not invest any more time or money in Palm OS than they absolutely have to. And from the looks of things, they don't intend to invest any time or money into Palm OS. Palm OS is like Latin, except that it's not dead. Palm is going to make a Linux smartphone, and that's their software future...
Mike also talks about the Treo not having WiFi and the fact that you can't really multitask with a Treo like you can with other smartphones. And he says that you can add a crap load of 3rd party apps on the Treo,
but unfortunately, some developers have left the fold.
Since Treos don't grow at nearly the rate of other smartphones, some folks consider it "dead." For some reason, this also includes Palm -- we once interviewed the CEO of Opera and asked him why they didn't make a Palm native version of Opera, and he told us Palm told him not to bother, since their new OS would be coming. That was probably a few years ago. And though some of the heavy-hitting search apps do make their way to Palm OS, some of them don't. Some of the third party apps that I used to love using are gone -- my favorite alarm clock hasn't seen an update in quite some time; some of the apps that I used in earlier years aren't even available to download anymore. Some of that can be attributed to the length of time Palms have been available, but not all -- for a number of reasons, Palm just didn't capitalize on the success of their PDAs when it comes to smartphones.
Head over to phone different and read Mike's excellent "Treo 680 First Looks All Over Again", and then be sure to swing by the Round Robin forums and post your thoughts and be entered in the contest.
And don't forget that we're extending the Round Robin for an extra week. That means that you have more time to enter daily to win the smartphone of your choice.
And one more thing: I hope that all of you and your families have a very safe and Happy Thanksgiving! ;-)
