Vodafone announces new Treo. Then what for Palm?

location based services

I reported back in April that the 3G GSM Windows Mobile Treo people have been calling "Hollywood" would be released on Vodafone this month. Well, it sounds like the release date has been pushed back to "later this year" for this much-anticipated new Treo, but we do have an official announcement from Vodafone now.

Getting a stronger foothold in Europe is a big deal for Palm since smartphone adoption and mobile email usage is much higher there. They will campaign together with Microsoft with push email and superior user experience as the driving message to European business customers. I'm not too surprised about the delay. A Cingular sales rep I spoke with last week said his company had plans to release both of the new Treos that Palm had promised for later this year (the rumored codenames are now "Lennon" and "Nitro") but that Palm had just set the release date back for some indefinite period of time.

As I've discussed here before, Palm has an interesting business problem when it comes to releasing another Palm OS Treo this year. The 700P is very fresh and designed to run on EvDO networks, so logically you would suppose that Palm would want to deliver a comparable Palm OS Treo to run on 3G GSM networks. The problem is that Palm OS Garnet is going to have great difficulty, in my judgment, complying with the stricter UMTS standards that are applied to 3G GSM networks. Specifically, the requirement to handle simultaneous concurrent voice and data streams without pausing the data stream during a call is a tricky problem for the Palm OS, which at the application layer is fundamentally a single-tasking system. Hopefully Palm has figured out a way to make this work. I've speculated that Palm would try to ship its next Palm OS Treo with it's semi-secret skunkworks Linux system to solve this problem, but the intelligence I've been able glean leaking out of Palm indicates that that won't be ready until some time in 2007. If Palm hasn't managed to retrofit Palm OS with some multitasking capability (at least for the phone application) you have to ask yourself what the selling point for that next Treo is going to be. How will Palm differentiate it from the Treo 650 if they can't tout high-speed data?

Smaller, sleeker form factor?

Perhaps, but this would need to be quite a makeover and I doubt that Palm is going to squeeze a decent Treo into anything close to a Motoroloa Q-sized enclosure. Touchscreen phones with high resolution screens are necessarily bigger and require bigger batteries.

Push email via BlackBerry Connect?

The 650 already has it.

Aggressive pricing?

The 650 is already aggressively priced ($125 through Amazon) now that it's been out on GSM for a year and a half. Is a new Treo going to come in under that?

What about iTunes?

What about taking a page from Motorola's playbook and partnering with Apple to integrate iTunes? That would be an interesting move as a way to appeal to a broader market, but I wonder how successful that would be unless they also pulled off a sexy new form factor.

Location! Location! Location!

I'd love to see Palm open up an API for accessing data from the GPS receiver in the Treo and integrate some nice navigation software. A smartphone version of the Garmin iQue would be a terrific idea and wouldn't require any hardware that they don't already have in the Treo 650, since E911 legislation in the US has required GPS receivers to be installed in mobile phones for some time now. If Palm coupled that with the iTunes integration I think they could get away with a more modest refresh of the form factor and have an interesting offering. Are there GSM network operators that are ready to jump into location-based services the way Nextel has done? It may be wishful thinking, but I'd sure like to think so.

Update: It's been brought to my attention that the E911 legislation only requires satellite GPS (Assisted GPS) for devices running on CDMA networks. For some reason the GSM carriers can get away with supplying location data based on cell tower triangulation alone, which is only accurate to within about 150-300 meters. Unfortunately this makes it much less likely that Cingular or T-Mobile would come to Palm requesting a GPS-enabled phone.

This shouldn't stop Palm and/or PalmSource from developing a location API for all their future Treos, though. For example, the Nokia E61 doesn't have a GPS receiver but does have a location API (in Java, at least) making it easy for developers to write applications that use lo-fi tower-based positioning or Bluetooth-connected GPS receivers. With a native location API, Palm's CDMA Treos could leverage the full power of the onboard GPS they already have and the GSM phones (assuming the operators don't want to pay the cost for the receiver) could still support the same applications--only via a wireless GPS peripheral. Truthfully, for applications like car navigation the peripheral approach is almost better in some ways: the receiver can more easily be positioned for best satellite connection and is powered independently, reducing the drain on the handset batteries. Still, for marketing purposes Palm should really consider making GPS integration (both software and receiver) a priority, even in some of its GSM handsets.