HANDHELDS
 What About...the Next Handspring Treo?
What will it look like? I've been receiving quite a few emails from both people who own the present Treo and those (mostly in the medical field) who are considering purchasing "something for email, like a Blackberry." Everyone is anxiously awaiting any information about the next version of the Treo which purportedly was demoed at Walt Mossberg's D: ATD conference last week.
Certainly, the first consideration for any device such as this is the service provider, which in this case is Sprint PCS Vision, a CDMA 1xRTT digital network. When it comes right down to it, the functionality of the unit is dependent upon this wireless network. In another post on this blog, I reported that results of the tests I performed using the bandwidth meter I had recently downloaded. Bottom line is that I'm constantly surprised how ubiquitous this service is, as well as providing Internet access consistently better than a dial-up modem.
Even when I'm sitting at my computer, my Treo is scanning for new email on a regular basis, and when I hear the short tone, I know that I can check the new messages.
People are asking me about "thumb typing." I recently got into a discussion with Ross Rubin at Wireless Supersite about how effective it is with the Treo. I could see how at first glance it would seem improbably, but once you actually use it to answer email or post to a blog, you find out that you can shoot out 3 or 4 sentences, easier than using any other type of input modality. Besides I can across a blog entry by Dan Bricklin where he gives says that the Treo keyboard "...works amazingly well."
Another blogger, Lee Potts, a medical graphic designer for Merck, has been asking me about the use of Treo's Blazer browser for accessing web pages. (more to come...)
3:43:48 AM 
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