PALMONE LAUNCHES NEW TREO 650 ACROSS EUROPE
I won't go into details about the press release below but all that I can say at this stage is that a 'Q2' launch in Europe is considerably later than I had anticipated - I thought that there would be a launch announcement now and that first Treo 650 units would hit UK stores in March. Now it looks like Europeans will have to wait until April before they get theirs....
Building on the success of the Treo 600 with high-resolution screen, wider email access and usage, expanded multimedia capabilities, Bluetooth®, removable battery and Talk Now(tm) functionality
LONDON, Feb. 14th, 2005 -- palmOne, Inc. (Nasdaq: PLMO), a leader in handheld computing and communications solutions, and Orange, one of the world's largest mobile communications companies, today announced the launch of the new Treo(TM) 650 smartphone in the UK, France and Switzerland.
The Treo 650 - which is scheduled to be available in Q2 2005 - offers a compact, full-featured mobile phone with email, a Palm OS(R) organiser, messaging, web access2, digital camera and QWERTY/AZERTY keyboard. It is also one of Orange's Talk Now(tm) phones, giving customers instant access to groups of friends or colleagues at the touch of a dedicated button on the side of the phone. As an Orange Signature phone, it also comes equipped with Orange-specific applications, such as Orange Backup (which allows customers to automatically back up Contacts, SIM data, Calendar, Tasks, Memos, Mail and images wirelessly on a remote server) and Orange Download (enabling customers to receive updated software from Orange directly to the phone). palmOne and Orange will be supporting the launch of the Treo 650 with a broad range of marketing initiatives, including advertising campaigns.Florian Seiche, director of Devices for the Orange Group, said: "The Treo 600 was one of the most successful Orange phones in our Signature catalogue last year in terms of data usage. Now we're pleased to be offering this even more advanced smartphone to our customers. As well as the great multimedia capabilities the Treo 650 offers, our customers can also benefit from its in-built Talk Now(tm) functionality, which comes as standard on the handset. It's great to continue our relationship with palmOne and to once again be the first in Europe to offer the newest member of the Treo family."
François Bornibus, vice president, EMEA, for palmOne, said: "According to Canalys, sales of smartphones grew by 160 percent year-on-year in EMEA last quarter3, highlighting the great market opportunity that exists for palmOne and mobile carriers such as Orange. We are delighted to be working with Orange to deliver the Treo 650, a world-class smartphone, to its customer base in Europe."
Bornibus continued: "Research in Europe shows that 61 percent of business decisions are being delayed because of waiting for people to reply to email.4 Having access to email on the move using a mobile device such as the new Treo 650 smartphone should help people overcome these challenges."
Treonauts want to go global...
Comments
This is only the date for the Orange branded Treo 650. It is further perfectly unclear, when or whether a Treo without Branding appears in Europe.
I guess Orange have signed a deal so they get to sell the Treo 650 in Europe before anyone else, including PalmOne themselves, much like Cingular's deal in the US.
Of course that doesn't answer the question of why Europeans have to contiune waiting whilst GSM Treo's are readily available in the US now :o(
These neverending delays are extremely embarrassing. I hope the "non Orange Treo" will come in March, cause there is no need for software customizing.
Regards from Germany
Juergen
If you are in a hurry, don't wait until the unlock GSM version is available in Europe. It's complex to buy from a USA company but you can buy from Asian websites, pay in euros and get your Treo 650 in days. You'll pay probably more, but you will can enjoy and take economical benefits from the features of the Treo 650 months before other.
This may be an alternative for the English version of Treo 650. I´m waiting for the German version with localized operating system and QWERTZ keyboard. This version is not available in Asia.
Regards from Germany
Juergen
has it been confirmed meanwhile, that there will be a treo with QWERTZ-keyboard? ich traue palmone inzwischen alles zu ... :-/
I suppose you can choose the smartphone language (as usual on any PDA) in the first start. I am going to use Grafity like software to write, so I shall not miss the Spanish keys.
Another keyboardless option is the XPlore M68 from GSPDA. http://www.gspda.com/product_1.htm
Orange (UK) Treo 600 to 650 Upgrade: The Real Story… after a day and a half
Finally I have had my long awaited Treo 650 delivered on the 23-May-2005 this is my second day with it and I am having very mixed feeling about the whole upgrade experience. Because it is an upgrade and not a new purchase I only get seven days to checkout the new piece of hardware whereas in reality I only get four days, until Thursday 26-May-2005 as they count the last Friday the day I ordered it and the weekend I did not have it in their calculation.
My experience so far with the upgrade of my well loved and well used Treo 600, as I said above, has been mixed. The new Treo looks great, the keypad and buttons have been improved even thought the original 600 were perfectly fine for me. The screen is clear and very sharp and is streets ahead of its predecessor. My major disappointment with the whole experience has been on the support side with nobody at Orange handset support having seen the phone never-mind able to answers questions about it. This phone was due for release in Feb 2005 and was only released Friday 20 May 2005 on the Orange UK network, you would have thought that there was plenty of time to train up the relevant people to support this product. Never-the-less I did persevere with Orange, especially as I had nowhere else to go, and found a very helpful supervisor who gave me the name, contact number and email address of PalmOne support company for UK and Europe unfortunately they do not cover support for the Orange Treo 600 or 650 flavours. I also spoke to another call centre support person at Orange regarding the SMS application (for specific’s see below) who has passed my SMS issues up the chain within Orange by email. He has promised to get back to me by Friday! I’ll let you know how I get along. The bottom line is that between Orange and PalmOne no-one is taking responsibility to support this “Smartphone”. I have to admit I had the same problems when I first purchased my Treo 600 but I really did think things would have improved over the year especially with all the competition currently surrounding smart phones!
My observations / comments on the Orange (UK) Treo 600 to 650 Upgrade so far…
- Before doing any upgrade to your desktop or phone take a back up of palm directory which contains your desktop software and backup your user data too! Store this somewhere very safe as it as the only comfort I had for many hours during the upgrade process. I would recommend you find your desktop software CD too as this I need too.
- The first up grade process caused the Treo 650 to loop within the reboot cycle I do not know why as a number of applications where removed to a separate directory and deemed incompatible with the 650. The solutions to the reboot loop was to perform a hard reset on the 650 and re-install Treo 600 s/w & data from above back-up and repeat the upgrade removing all but essential third party s/w.
- Once you have upgraded the desktop software if you now try to re-sync to the old faithful Treo 600 (which I did!) you will find that none of your address data will be there. I assume due to a file format change between versions.
- After reloading the Treo 600 desktop, doing a hard reset to the 600 and re-sync to get back where we started I was ready to start all over again.
- This time Success!! Data loaded successfully… Hey wait a minute there’s data missing:
None of my five mail accounts have been transferred to my Treo 650
Therefore, none of my numerous emails were transferred either.
None of my SMS Chat logs have exported
None of the internal phone images were exported either.
All the Favourite buttons have successfully exported but without any of the Quick Key values.
All Web bookmarks were transfers to the 650’s web application but stored pages just had the original links.
What I found when the 650 was up and running…
- The Orange Treo 650 has now disabled the five-way navigator ability to launch application when the phone application is running. Instead we now have a “fixed” icon strip down the left-hand side of the screen to allow “quick” access to:
o Contacts: Contacts, Add a Contact
o Phone: Call Log, Dial Pad
o Message: New SMS, Unread SMS (Count), Unread MMS(Count), Unread eMail(Count)
o Calendar: Calendar, Today’s appointment
o Camera: Take a Picture, Media Album, Background (Temporary at any rate!)
o Internet: Orange World, Info, Fun, Tools, Your Page
- Theses icon cannot be changed to your favourites applications, or have programs added or removed and they cannot be sorted in a different order. I could not find a way to do it and when I quizzed Orange they confirmed the phone start-up screen was fixed!
- The Phone application menu on the 650 has been reduced from four items to just two “Edit” and “Options”. Options can only be accessed directly from the Dial Pad screen. The “missing” Treo 600 menu items that were previously available are:
Record: New Contact, Beam Business Card
Options: Display Preferences…
Views: Contacts, Favourites, Dial Pad, Call Log
- Although the New Contact item can be found on the Quick Access strip, Beam Business Card is now missing from the phone application.
- The new phone application supplied allows you to set your own background image once you’ve beamed you images from your old Treo to the new one. However, at every sync operation or soft reset the image reverts back to the default image supplied with the phone! I don’t think this should be happening!
- The reset button is now under the battery cover case, the battery has fallen out a number of times while performing a reset.
- New to the Treo 650 is a feature where Contact telephone numbers do not appear in the summary list when searching for a contact if non-numeric characters appear in the telephone field. This was not the case with the 600.
- The SMS application in the Treo 600 & 650 still only shows those numbers tagged as Mobile/Other even though technology has moved on and thanks to BT (British Telecom) you can send SMS messages to landline numbers now!
- New Treo 650 Email application now does not allow third party outgoing (SMTP) mail server because will not let you enter a username and password. Although it has been improved by allowing incoming and outgoing Port Numbers and both SLL connections and APOP/ ESMTP authentication. This is all well and good as long as Orange’s own SMTP servers are working but it is always good to have an alternative just in case they are not.
- Screen power down seems to be set to about 10 seconds with is really annoying even if the phone is fully charged with the power cable still plugged in!!
- Talk Now new piece of s/w to allow instant and direct communication between Treos (650’s only) without the need for dialling much like a walkie talkie caused numerous crashes after installation and so was removed.
- Favourites pages cannot but accessed by an application with the 650, the 600 had an application called “Orange” which I mapped to the centre navigation button to allow me quick access to a variety of programs and functions. I did get a tip during the day from the PalmOne support centre that the Favourites application could be launched from the phone application by pressing “S” then “Alt”. It worked I don’t know how or why, I was just very grateful!
Surely the upgrade experience should be better than this with what is a great and long anticipated product from well established companies such as PalmOne and Orange?
Yours
Mr. JR Walker
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