Treo Road Show wrap-up

As I mentioned on my blog earlier today I attended the Treo Road Show today in NYC. The event clearly focused on the use of Treo 600s within the enterprise with a strong slant on messaging, though there were a few interesting demos on security as well.

Attendees included: Anyware, Appforge, CREDANT Technologies, Goodlink, Intellisync, JP Mobile, Notify Technologies, Sonic Mobility and SEVEN.

There was no mention directly of the Treo 650, but quite a few jokes were made between audience and presenters that it's clear this is happening imminently.

Ed Colligan, PalmOne President started the day by walking through a brief history of the wireless space and the committement that had been made starting in the early 90's. As you may know, he had once been part of Handspring, and commented that the sole reason the Visor had an expansion slot was to accomodate a wireless radio. Since the space was wide open for a variety of technologies at the time, they wanted to keep options open for carriers and for the end user.

While not news to anyone here, Ed mentioned that PalmOne was focused on redefining the I in PIM to reflect all your personal information rather than simply your datebook and contacts in the traditional sense. They've been focused on enabling truly personal computing and are committed to the enabling mobility on a mass scale. As the Treo was developed, the primary focus was on making a great phone, which happened to include some smart data capabilities. Attention focused on making the device personal so people would want to carry it with them most of the time. This benefits the corporate market pushing units into worker's hands just as much as it does the consumer, though as Mr. Colligan mentioned the main consumer for Palm products has been the prosumer.

Next up was Rob Haitani, the Product Architect's behind the Treo 600. I found this portion to be the most interesting of the time spent in session... Rob focused on living the Zen of Palm, which you may know is a rigid balance between feature, simplicity and ease of use. Rob is totally focused on the constant refinement of the User Interface of the Treo and has to make some very interesting decisions along the way many of which may run counter to intuition at first but make sense once applied to the mobile smaller scale of the Treo.

Features get prioritized based on making the UI fast, easy to use and how frequently you might use them. With regard to speed, he called attention to the datebook and specifically the calendar view. While in other applications or devices, you might find a drop down for month, the Treo Datebook includes the full year. The key element missing is actually an OK button but that gets solved based on how a user interacts with the screen. In this case you can actually get to any day of the year within 2 taps, which is a most impressive achievement. You might be saying come on, who cares about the extra step to view months in a drop down, but if you consider how frequently many people schedule things this is a real time saver and makes the Treo something that is simple and quite friendly. A great deal of effort was been put forth to enbale a stylus-free environment since once you have your hands on the keyboard, it can be quite awkward to have to shift and reach for the stylus to achieve a basic task.

Many of these decisions are driven primarily by frequency. For example you add many more contacts than you delete and so the new contact is on screen, one tap away but to delete a contact actually takes a few steps. Another key factor in consideration is how to best display information and description of things you might be thinking about when making decisions. I don't have the slide electronically to share, but 2 versions of the same screen were shown, a before and after if you will of how to state that you are going to potentially purge datebook items. While the both make sense, you can convert the information presented on the after much more easily. Another interesting feature considered was the use of ringtone management or profiles. A decision was made to eliminate a profile manager from the current model (not that it was there, but rather from the drawing board) instead focusing on the use of the hardware rocker which quickly controls all the sounds your Treo makes. I love this switch and use it frequently. It's easy to deal with even from within a pocket and that's really the whole idea. The usual location for a profile manager on phones is down the menu tree... This makes it more difficult to find and use and actually makes even having it a wash for most people who don't fully explore their devices. This focus on protecting you from rather than exposing you to the technology has been a major reason Palm has been able to pull so many new users its way. Most do not care what the platform really is, they just want a tool to get the job done. As we all know, the Treo is the preferred method, but there are quite a few other options within the PalmOne family.

The last point made by Mr. Haitani was that the technology behind the next big thing exists today. PalmOne will just be utilizing it in a new way to make it easier and more accessible than has been done previously if at all and will focus on solving problems for the user rather than simply focusing on a feature for feature's sake.

The final portion of the session was focused on demos by each of the vendors present. You can link to each of their web sites above and see what they have in store. The only highlights for me were the revised GoodLink UI and that there is now a SEVEN personal edition. I'll be looking into SEVEN to see how it compares to other email clients I've used and reviewed... Goodlink has done a really nice job updating the interface to make it feel extremely friendly on the small scale of the Treo screen, yet enable all the functionality you are used to in an Exchange environment. There was brief mention of the Exchange deal PalmOne made and it seems this will push a great deal more functionality to Versamail in future releases... Perhaps we'll know more officially soon. The idea of Palm utilizing Microsoft software was really played down. What's happening is more of a licensing of a library of two for Palm to write to in order to enable exchange connectivity out of the box. That's about all I took away from today's session. I'm looking forward to the official launch of the Treo 650 like the rest of you. It will be interesting to see first hand how the Zen of Palm carries forward as the Treo advances.