Palm’s Last Stand: The Palm Treo Pro

Years ago, Palm was the iPhone of its day. Cool device, did what you needed, and had name cachet (“is that a Palm Pilot?”). Nowadays, not so much. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone that’s bullish on the company these days.

Palm hopes that all changes with the introduction of the Palm Treo Pro, a Windows Mobile 6.1-based smartphone that does a lot of things right. It may be too late to stop the iPhone (for regular folk) and BlackBerry (for business dudes) combo, but Palm has done a decent job with this one.
The smartphone, which comes out in the US in the fall, will cost $549. (That’s without a carrier subsidy, which is what explains its sorta expensive price tag.) The early buzz on it is that, yeah it’s actually halfway decent, but it might not be enough to save Palm’s formerly good name.
The smartphone: built-in Wi-Fi, 2-megapixel camera, a dedicated e-mail button, GPS, multimedia playback, standard headphone jack, etc. Nothing out of the ordinary, but it’s mainly about the phone’s looks this time around.

Expect more on this as people actually get to use it. It is, after all, Palm’s last stand of sorts.
Palm Treo Pro [Palm]