Palm Releases 755p, no one cares.
UPDATE 3: Some thoughts on the disconnect between the glowing reviews of the 755p and the widespread criticism of it in the blogosphere.
UPDATE 2: A random sampling of blogs posting on the 755p shows someone on the verge of jumping the Treo ship, someone who believes the 755p was an act of desperation and someone saying the 755p is simply what the 700p should have been. I’d say Palm has a bit of a problem on their hands. I hope Hawkins can save them.
UPDATE: Check out the comments on the official palm blog. It is a lot of comments and almost everyone of them wonders why there’s no wifi, why it is just another 700p, if there’s going to be a tradein rebate for 700p owners since that one was so massively screwed up or other general palm complaints. If that isn’t a clue to Palm that they’ve been doing something wrong… well, I guess I wouldn’t surprised.
Palm just announced that they have released their latest smartphone the 755p. If you want to read a preview of it, Palm Infocenter published one. Here’s the short review - nothing changed, this is just yet another rerelease of the same hardware/software platform that they’ve been doing for years.
Don’t believe me? They pretty much admit it themselves. Seriously, they put up a comparison chart of their current line up. You can’t even believe it. There’s some minor differences between the os’s (you know, the screensize and the.. os..) but they are largely all identical.
Let’s pull some nuggets out of this preview and see what this “new” offering has for us:
The keyboard and application buttons are identical to the 680/750 and are nice and sturdy.
Here’s a difference:
There is no reset button on the device, so you must take out and reseat the battery to perform a soft reset.
Ahh, they took away the reset button to make it even more inconvenient to do a soft reset (which you have to do with unsettling frequency on a palmos device). Nice, that was definitely worth the wait..
Inside, the Treo 755p is powered by a 312 MHz Intel XScale processor. This is the same chip found in the 650, 680 and 700p. It also features the same amount of internal memory as its predecessor
The display is the standard Palm OS Treo 1.74″ x 1.74″ inch, 320 x 320 pixel TFT screen
A2DP support is still missing
One unique feature the 755p brings is a larger capacity battery.
Ahh, a unique feature! Larger capacity battery, that sounds great! How much larger?
Though this is larger than the 680 & 750’s capacity, it is 200mAh less than the original 700p battery.
Oh. Smaller than the battery of the device it is directly replacing (the 700p). Nice.
It basically includes the same set of software as the 700p with a few updated apps and added third party extras.
And there you have it. This is basically the same stuff they’ve been shoveling out forever, with a few new bundled apps like Bejeweled and some cool but whatever integration between the contacts app and Google Maps.
Wow. Go Palm go!
May 9th, 2007 at 9:20 am
“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
–Palm CEO Ed Colligan, November 2006.
Apparently, it takes a year to make the same phone twice. Perhaps that’s the lesson Palm learned that Apple won’t “just figure out.”
May 9th, 2007 at 9:46 am
LOL! That’s awesome.
May 10th, 2007 at 9:48 pm
sad, looks like i’m getting a blackberry unless they get their act together… uhh, right, like that’ll ever happen!
May 10th, 2007 at 10:34 pm
yeah, it does seem like they’re on the ball… but I’ll still cling to hope that Hawkin’s big announcement will yield something worthwhile… no?
June 17th, 2007 at 3:32 pm
I think you’re forgetting the big difference of the 755 not having an antenna…I have a Motorola Q and im not getting the 700 because im waiting for the 755 so i don’t have the antenna. How easily you forgot to mention that.
June 17th, 2007 at 3:40 pm
Ah, the good ol’ antenna. It’s true I didn’t mention it here, while I appreciate that they have removed it (and mention it in several other posts), I don’t think it really qualifies for big innovation… I didn’t really think of the antenna since they’ve already removed it for a couple other models.
February 29th, 2008 at 10:54 am
[...] what was it… what was it… Oh, right! It was when Colligan (Palm’s big boss) said this (in response to questions about Apple’s then forthcoming iPhone): “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,†[...]