The Official Palm Blog

Live From DigitalLife…it’s the Palm Centro smartphone…

   

We haven’t mobloged yet to the official Palm blog yet, so we thought it would be a great to do at DigitalLife, where we just announced the Palm Centro smartphone. We are actually using a Centro right now (a ruby red one as a matter of fact), and have included a few highlights about the phone as well as a picture from the press conference below.

Features of the Palm Centro include:
-New compact design, Centro is the smallest and lightest Palm phone to date
-$99.99 price point (after discounts and promotions)on Sprint’s Mobile Broadband Network (yes, it’s EvDO)
-Voice, text, IM, email, web, a full-color touch screen and full keyboard
-Available in two colors - ruby red and onyx black.

For those of you not to join the press conference, you can check out a playback of the webcast, available by 4 p.m. EST at: http://www.videonewswire.com/event.asp?id=42256.

We’ll be adding more pictures from DigitalLife throughout the day and talking more about Centro throughout the next couple weeks before availability (mid-October).

Updated:

Treocentral has a nice in-depth review and also a hands-on video. Check it out.

-Rob Katcher and Stephanie Richardson

-The Palm Lounge...not your ordinary tradeshow booth

-Me (Rob Katcher) showing off a Centro at the Palm Lounge

-Ed Colligan with The Buried Life (4 guys who created a list of a 100 things they want to do before they die). Check out their site: http://theburiedlife.com/.

New Verizon Wireless Software Updates Available

The new maintenance releases for the Verizon Wireless Treo 700p and 700w/wx are now available. For additional information on what is included in the software updates and to install on your device visit:

-Verizon Wireless Treo 700p

-Verizon Wireless 700w/wx

Thank you for your patience.

-Palm Treo 700p and 700w/wx Teams

Officially Announcing the Treo 500v Smartphone in EMEA

As you have read yesterday (or the day before that or even the day before that), Palm is announcing the Treo 500 smartphone, which is initially available to Vodafone customers throughout EMEA (officially official). Here is a link that contains product details and a list of countries the Treo 500v will be available in.

Product specs and benfits include:

·       Windows Mobile® 6 Standard software

·       Full qwerty keyboard

·       3G/UMTS network

·       Automatic delivery of Hotmail/MSN, Yahoo!, and Gmail, email as it arrives

·       Microsoft® Direct Push technology for delivery of Outlook® email

·       Access to Google Maps and eBay

·       Vodafone live! for news, sports, and entertainment on the go

·       Windows Media® Player Mobile for music and videos

·       2.0 megapixel camera captures video too

·      150MB of memory, expandable with microSD expansion card

Below is another image of the Treo 500v - notice the colors (our personal favorite is the "charcoal grey").

Also, Andrew Carton of Treonauts has wrriten an overview of the announcement in Europe.

-Treo 500v Team

It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's not Centro

There's been a lot of buzz about the new device our friends across the "pond" are planning to announce on September 12th...and it's not the Palm Centro smartphone!

Check back later for more info.

-Stephanie Richardson

A Message to Palm Customers, Partners and Developers

As many of you are aware, we are in the process of building our next generation software platform. We are very excited about how this is coming together. It has a modern flexible UI, instant performance, and an incredibly simple and elegant development environment. We are working hard on this platform and on the first smartphone that will take advantage of it.

In the course of the past several months, it has become clear that the right path for Palm is to offer a single, consistent user experience around this new platform design and a single focus for our platform development efforts. To that end, and after careful deliberation, I have decided to cancel the Foleo mobile companion product in its current configuration and focus all of our energies on delivering our next generation platform and the first smartphones that will bring this platform to market. We will, of course, continue to develop products in partnership with Microsoft on the Windows Mobile platform, but from our internal platform development perspective, we will focus on only one.

Because we were nearly at the point for shipping Foleo, this was a very tough decision. Yet I am convinced this is the right thing to do. Foleo is based on second platform and a separate development environment, and we need to focus our efforts on one platform. Our own evaluation and early market feedback were telling us that we still have a number of improvements to make Foleo a world-class product, and we can not afford to make those improvements on a platform that is not central to our core focus. That would not be right for our customers or for our developer community.

Jeff Hawkins and I still believe that the market category defined by Foleo has enormous potential. When we do Foleo II it will be based on our new platform, and we think it will deliver on the promise of this new category. We're not going to speculate now on timing for a next Foleo, we just know we need to get our core platform and smartphones done first.

I would like to thank our customers for their interest in Foleo. I know there will be disappointed folks who were looking forward to carrying a Foleo for all their mobile computing needs. I am certainly one of them. I would also like to thank the developers who have supported our Foleo efforts. They have been loyal to Palm and have worked hard to deliver some compelling solutions on the Foleo platform. I know that they will understand that the right thing to do for the long run is to focus on one platform that will live for years, rather than invest energy in a one-off solution. We will make every effort to make sure we bring our developers forward to our next generation platform.

This decision will require us to take a limited charge of less than $10 million dollars to our earnings. This is a lot of money, but it is a small price relative to the costs that would be required to support two platforms going forward. This decision is in the best interest of our customers, our team, our products and our shareholders. I hope this renewed focus at Palm will allow us to deliver more compelling solutions to our core smartphone market, and it will allow us to position ourselves for the long run around one Palm experience.

-Ed Colligan, CEO

Moblogging From Your Treo

I was excited to attend Gnomedex 7.0 in Seattle a couple weeks ago. I figured it would be the perfect opportunity to catch up with a lot of people I had previously only chatted with over email, show off some Treo smartphones and the Palm Foleo, do a little moblogging, etc. I covered off on most of the list, but I didn't get to do any moblogging - people kept coming by the Palm table to ask questions (imagine that). Several people actually came up and asked about moblogging from a Treo, so i figured it would be good to do a little roundup of moblogging solutions that are available on Treo smartphones.

-SixApart:

You can download moblogging apps for Typepad and Vox to Treos 650 and higher on both Palm OS and WinMo. Features and functionality include:

-Simple interface that includes blog post title, body, picture/video upload

-Update Categories

-Blogger:

You can moblog text and photos on Palm OS and WinMo Treos by sending a message to go@blogger.com from your phone. If you don’t already have a blogger account, sending the message itself is enough to create a new blog (you just need to go in a claim it).

-WordPress:

You can moblog text on Palm OS and WinMo Treos by setting up “blog-by-email” for your account using your mobile phone’s email application. There are also several add-ons and hacks, including posting to categories, automatic removal of email signatures and POP3/IMAL (+SSL).

-Flickr:

-Paul Loeffler

This list isn't comprehensive, so if you know of other moblogging solutions out there for Treos, feel free to post responses and share.

You can Twitter (moblog/“mini-blog”) from your Treo by using the Palm threaded chat threaded chat (Palm OS Treo 650 and higher or Treo 750) to send a text message, or by typing a message from the mobile Twitter site. You can also download the latest version of the free application MoTwit to your Palm OS Treo, which has shortcuts (”Open” combobox) that open the more common Twitter pages in your Web browser.

Twitter:

You can use your Palm OS or WinMo Treo to email photos directly to your Flickr account and post to your blog. Use the subject line for a title and the body of the email for a description. Make sure you set up posting to your blog from Flickr if you haven't already. Mark Ghosh provides a great overview of how to do this and more using WordPress.

-Set preferences for network, camera, archiving, uploading

-Vox provides control over who views stories, photos, videos or audio

Both Typepad and Vox also allow you to moblog directly by sending an email from your Treo – check out the support page to configure your moblogging settings.