Palm Treo

» see palm.com/treo as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i did not own a treo. by the years it mattered, 2004 to 2007, my phone was a nokia 3310 then a nokia 6230i, both turkish gsm-only handsets bought at a teknosa in ankara. the treo lived inside the american enterprise market. it was the device that consultants typed email on while waiting for a flight at jfk. that was not my world.

the handspring treo 180 shipped in november 2002. handspring was the company that jeff hawkins and donna dubinsky started after they left palm in 1998, and the treo was their answer to the question "what if the palm pilot had a phone radio". palm bought handspring back in 2003 and kept the treo brand. the treo 600 in 2003 and the treo 650 in 2004 were the models that turned it into the default smartphone for everyone who wore a suit to work.

at peak around 2005 to 2006, palm shipped about a million treos a quarter. the device had a thumb keyboard, a stylus, a small color screen, and a real web browser if you squinted. blackberry had the email side of the market. treo had the everything-else side. then in january 2007 steve jobs walked on stage with the iphone, and the floor started to fall out from under both companies at the same time.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the decline ~

palm tried windows mobile starting with the treo 700w in 2006 to broaden the market. it did not help. the operating system was already a generation behind what was coming. by 2008 the treo line was selling to existing customers who did not want to switch, not to new buyers. the last device was the treo pro on gsm, january 5 2009, made by htc on contract because palm could no longer afford to build its own hardware.

~ the day it ended ~

june 6 2009 the palm pre launched on sprint, running a new operating system called webos. palm officially dropped the treo brand at that point and bet the company on the pre. the pre sold poorly. hp bought palm in 2010 for 1.2 billion dollars and killed webos in august 2011. the treo and the pre died inside the same corporate funeral.

~ what came after ~

the iphone won the consumer market and android won everything else. the treo's contribution to the modern smartphone is the assumption that a phone should also be an email client, a calendar, a contacts database, and a real web browser, all on one device that fits in a suit pocket. blackberry had the same assumption. so did the sidekick. but treo was the one that arrived first with a stylus, a touch screen, and a software keyboard at the same time. that combination took another five years to become standard.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »