Waiting for the Next Generation of Cellphone/PDAs

Ernest Svenson and Rick Klau love their Handspring Treos. When I've got a steady income, I'll be in the market both for a new PDA and a new cellphone, and this sort of combination seems to be the way to go. I'm a little glad I don't have the money to splurge right now, though. I want to see what happens with these technologies in the next several months.

I'm a SprintPCS customer, and I will probably continue with them for another year once my annual contract concludes because they've given me decent service in this area (I live near Denver, Colorado). That means that I'll be looking for a phone that supports at least the CDMA2000 1xRTT standard. I think most current contenders offer at least one phone that supports that wireless protocol. One reason (aside from being broke) I hesitate now, though, is that most current offerings use yesterday's PalmOS technologies. Handspring's Treo and Samsung's I330 both run version of PalmOS 3.5.2 -- the same as my girlfriend's three-year-old Palm. They also run the VZ or EZ versions of the Motorola Dragonball processor, at 33MHz.

Now, maybe I'm overhesitant. There's a good chance that I wouldn't need more from a PalmOS device than what that kind of device can provide. After all, if one wants more, one might not want it all to be built into a telephone. I worry about buying an 'older-style' PalmOS device built into a phone at exactly the time when Palm, Sony, and other PalmOS device manufacturers aim to push users and developers away from those older devices and toward PalmOS 5 running on ARM processors. I was an Apple user back when the PowerPC came out, and even though there was plenty of software around for my little 68LC040-based machine for a while, it became a drag before long. Right now, the ARM architecture with PalmOS 5 costs just a bit too much to build into a phone and still have an affordable product, but that will probably change before long.

If I had the money and my anxieties about PDA obsolescence were allayed, I'd get the Treo. It has the Palm screen on the lower half of a clamshell, which I like much better than Kyocera's decision to place the screen on the top half. I also like the thumb-keyboard, which I haven't seen any Handspring competitor offer on a phone.

Ooh, one more catch. I want something that will let me attach a full-size keyboard to take notes with. Maybe that's the point at which one should just admit that the phone-PDA combination isn't going to fly and just get one of each. (Bluetooth-enabled, of course!)