Click to View

For months now, rumblings about a Windows Mobile-based Treo smartphone have circulated around the Internet rumor mill. These rumors gained some credence in April with a report from a writer at newswireless.net that he saw one of these mythical devices in action.

This week, the most persuasive evidence of a Windows Mobile Treo yet has come to light; in the form of a video and some pictures submitted to the Engadget blog. The low-res video shows Treo 650-like smartphone running the Windows Mobile for Pocket PC operating system and not the Palm platform.

You see that the handset appears to have a flash, camera, keyboard and Bluetooth like a traditional Treo, as well as - most convincingly - the same connector.

The pictures (see above & bellow) of the mystery device are even clearer, showing a Treo-like handset with a Verizon logo—which would make it a CDMA network phone—among other details, including Windows Mobile on the smartphone's display.


Windows Mobile Treo 670

(Palm, Inc. must surely have GPS/GPRS version of the Microsoft-based Treo in development too.)

As one pundit points out, if the Treo 670—the rumored name for the device—runs on the Pocket PC edition of Windows Mobile, then it couldn't support the same 320 x 320 pixel screen as the Treo 650. Instead, you would either have a display at a higher 480 x 480 pixels or lower 240 x 240 pixels.

Road Less Traveled
Palm traveling down the path towards a Windows Mobile device seems heretical. Yet Palm vendors can theoretically use the same hardware to support other mobile platforms because today's Palm OS PDAs and smartphones run on ARM processors.

Also, since Palm split from PalmSource and is a hardware only vendor, the company is free to pursue alternative operating systems to create more appealing products, help the bottom line, and please shareholders.

With the mobile market rapidly moving from PDAs to smartphones, it may be in the company's interest to boost the number of platforms supported by its handsets to attract the widest range of consumers and (just as importantly) wireless carriers.

Samsung utilizes such a strategy by distributing Palm, Windows Mobile, and Symbian smartphones, in addition to its high-end feature phones and everyday cell phones.