Treo MS Mobile?
Now here's an unanticipated piece of news... According to a News.com article, a research note from Needham & Co. states almost categorically that palmOne will soon announce plans to develop a Microsoft OS Treo!?!?
Shock, heresy, nonsense - surely I must have read this wrong!?!? Considering that the investment bank in question and its analysts would look like complete morons if this turned out not to be true I find it extremely unlikely that they would have released this note without some very hard information to back this up.
Thus, I am left to conclude that we will indeed be seeing a Treo "some time in the future" developed around Windows Mobile... I have not yet fully fathomed the consequences of such a development - for example will palmOne change its name to MSOne? 
Joking aside let's look a the situation a little more closely.
Since "the split" palmOne has primarily become a device manufacturer of PDA's and Smart Phones (thanks to its acquisition of Handspring) while PalmSource is the keeper of the Palm OS which it licenses to palmOne as well as other companies such as Samsung.
As a very late entrant in the mobile phone industry palmOne faces an uphill (but not insurmountable) battle against behemoths such as Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, SonyEricsson and LG. However, in the emerging narrow space of smart phones palmOne has performed extremely well and as I noted earlier I consider the Treo 650 to be the very best such device in the world.
So if palmOne already has the very best smart phone in the world why would it possibly want to license Windows Mobile?
I personally feel that the general market is 'confused' enough as it is with Palm's split, the acquisition of Handspring and the launch of a new product category without the need to potentially make this even worse by introducing the option of a buying a Treo running PalmOS versus one running Windows Mobile (a new separate line of P1 smart phones running WinMobile might be a slightly different story).
At any rate, we'll make sure to keep our ears open for further news on this front.
[Via News.com]
It always feels good to be a Treonaut... 
Comments
Not really that surprising, actually. Palm OS has been loosing against Windows and Symbian for some time now. PalmOne is about the only manufacturer left for Palm OS devices, which is not really good for competition and innovation. Even the Treo 650, which I will buy, really is way late behind other smartphones given the feature set. Years ago, it was Palm that were the leaders in the field, now they are tagging along. Bluetooth should already have been available more than 2 years ago, WiFi for over a year. Just look around the offices and check out how many Sony Ericsson P900 etc. are around or how many Windows PDAs and it's sadly obvious that the Palm users are an ever shrinking minority.
While I will personally stick with Palm OS for as long as it's reasonably doable,
maybe PalmOne just wants a share of the Windows PDA market. Of course, if PalmOne will start to sell Windows PDAs and/or smartphones, I don't see a really bright future for Palmsource.
Does this mean that it'll be like other MS devices and have lots of memory and also WiFi????
Well there's a SD Wifi card for the WindowsCE OS, it's one way to get Wifi on a treo............
Will the Palm WiFi card work on the Treo 650? It's supposed to have an SDIO SD slot.
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