Treo Cousins

Ever heard of a company called Group Sense Limited? No? Don't worry, me neither until I read Palm Infocenter today.

GSL is a Hong Kong based licensee of Palm OS that has manufactured a number of smartphones which although interesting do not come close to matching the Treo 600.  On Friday, the company announced via the Hong Kong Palm Users Group the release of its latest model the GSL Xplorer M28 pictured below.

According to Palm Infocenter the phone "features a 2.2 inch 260k color TFT display, with a 176x220 pixel resolution. It will runs Palm OS Garnet 5.4 on a undisclosed ARM processor. The phone will include 32MB of RAM, as well as an SDIO expansion slot. It also includes mp3 audio support, a 300k digital camera and polyphonic ringtones. It also features a push down slider (not shown), that reveals a hard numeric keypad."  The keypad will undoubtedly be like the one on their previous G88 model.  Also note that there's no antenna! (I wish that palmOne would get the hint and erase it from our future Treos as well...)

This latest Palm OS smartphone follows on the heels of the company's two previous models the G18 without keyboard and G88 with sliding keyboard below .

G18     G88

Unfortunately, although the phones are certainly 'nice' looking and with good overall specification the estimated retail price of $850 ($200 with Vodafone contract in the UK) will certainly dampen any Treonauts' enthusiasm...  Shame really because I wouldn't mind seeing palmOne releasing a similar family of Treos in the future - you never know it might still happen...