Treo Kills Hotel Room Keys?

I was in New York for a conference last week when the plastic key to my hotel room stopped working. The key required re-programming, and I didn't give it another thought until a few days later when the same thing happened in a different hotel.

The person at the desk asked me if the card key had been next to any tech gadgets. That's when I realized both cards were in the same pocket as my Treo.

So in addition to generating weird chirping noises on almost any audio equipment, my Cingular-based Treo appears to erase hotel room keys. Anybody out there experience the same?

Handhelds: What's in a Name?

Michael Ducker over at TreoCentral has a nice piece on PalmOne's upcoming rebranding as Palm, Inc. (Here's our own Denny Arar's post on this news.)

As a guy who's been following Palm since it was a tiny company that made software for Apple's Newton, I'm glad to see it's getting its maiden name back. But the change got me thinking that there seems to be something about PDAs and ever-shifting naming strategies.

When I first saw a preview of the original Palm handheld back in 1995, it was going to be the Taxi. But there was another product by that name, so when the handheld finally shipped, it was called the Pilot. Then it became the Palm Pilot (a name which, while short-lived as an official moniker, is still in wide use as a nickname for handheld computers in general). Then the Pilot pen people groused, and the handheld became the Palm. Then the "Palm" started getting modified by product names such as Zire and Tungsten. Along the way, Palm the company became PalmOne...and now it's Palm again. I'm not even counting the fact that the Treo was once the Handspring Treo, is currently the PalmOne Treo, and will presumably become the Palm Treo real soon now.

As for the chronology of names applied to devices based on Microsoft's handheld operating system...I'll try, but I'll probably get it wrong. The earliest machines, with clamshell cases and keyboards, were known simply as Windows CE devices. The first completely pen-driven ones were called Palm PCs--until Palm, Inc. squawked, at which point they became Palm-Size PCs...which evolved into Pocket PCs. Today, Microsoft believes it's very important to draw some sort of distinction between the OS (Windows Mobile) and the devices themselves (still Pocket PCs as of the last time I checked).

Confused yet? If the sum of the money poured into all these PDA rebrandings had been spent on R&D, we'd probably have razor-thin handhelds with holographic screens and hundred-hour battery life...

Award-winning Palm Apps at PalmSource

More than 20 new Palm apps were announced at PalmSource today, but the ones that got the most attention were the four winners of PalmSource's Powered Up awards honoring innovative new products.

The ones most likely to appeal particularly to Treo users: SplashData's SplashBlog, a $30, super easy-to-use mobile blog where you can share images captured by the Treo's camera, which was recognized as best multimedia solution; and Stand Alone's Quick News, a $15 RSS reader with podcast support, which was named best wireless/over-the-air solution.

The Missing Sync, Mark/Space's $40 synching program for Mac users, won the award for best enterprise/productivity solution, but the application that clearly caught the imagination of reporters at a news conference was LDW Software's $20 Village Sim, winner of the game/entertainment solution prize. The app, from the same folks who brought you the Tamagotchi-esque Little Palm Pet, puts you in charge of a tribe of primitive people whom you must not only feed and house, but teach and guide as they explore their island habitat. There are puzzles to solve along the way--and even when your Palm is turned off, life in your little village goes on. So, when you return, things have changed. I'm looking forward to playing!

PalmSource Loses Its CEO

This just in: David Nagel, the first and only CEO of PalmSource, the company that develops the Treo 650's Palm OS, stepped down yesterday. Patrick McVeigh, a senior vice president, is interim CEO.

The timing is startling, because this is the week of the company's developer conference (which is also called PalmSource), and it was all supposed to kick off tomorrow with a keynote speech from...PalmSource CEO David Nagel. The speech (which presumably may still happen in some form) was going to be titled "Simply Wireless," so you can bet that the Treo would have gotten some mentions.

Anyhow, PC World will be at the conference, and while I don't know who will be giving the keynote, we'll have a reporter on the scene. Stay tuned for reports on what we learn.

All Your Music on Your Treo All the Time

Like my colleague Andrew Eisner, I've been enjoying listening to Shoutcast audio on my Treo, courtesy of NormSoft's excellent Pocket Tunes music software. But what I really wanted to do was listen to my own music collection on the Treo--and more of it than I could cram onto the 1GB SD card I've got.

So I rummaged around a bit on the Web and found GlooNet, a free service which works with Pocket Tunes Pro (which costs $28) to let you wirelessly stream music and photos from any Windows PC with a Net connection onto your Treo. GlooNet uses a server application that sits on the PC, redirecting music to any device with a browser and MP3 player software that can handle M3U playlists and MP3s stored at URLs rather than locally. (It's a bit like Orb, an intriguing service which also handles video and which works with Pocket PCs and a variety of phones, but not Palm devices.) It took me about five minutes to sign up for GlooNet and install and configure the software, and I was up, running, and listening to my songs on my handheld.

GlooNet throttles down the bit rate of music on the fly to match the bandwidth of the device you're listening on. With the Treo, it initially played music at 32-kbps, which sounded a little like AM played on a vintage 1970s RadioShack FlavoRadio. I told GlooNet to convert music to a more listenable 96-kbps, and that worked just fine.

The service did indeed give me access to every tune on my home network, allowing for iPod-like variety. But not, unfortunately, iPod-like ease-of-use. You select songs in the Treo's browser, but it hands off a playlist to Pocket Tunes for the actual playing of music. The browser's a tad sluggish as usual--bogging you down quite a bit if your music collection is as big as mine--and hopping between two programs to manipulate your music is bearable but not exactly intuitive.

With a little experimentation, I figured out how to save and rename these playlists on my SD card, which let me jump back later to an artist or an album from within Pocket Tunes, without having to first use GlooNet in the browser. That still doesn't provide a wholly satisfactory user experience--you can't see a song's title without playing it, for instance.

All in all, GlooNet makes the most sense if you just load up an album or other long list of songs and sit back to listen, rather spending a lot of time picking and choosing specific tracks. Of course, it only works when you have a data connection, so it doesn't go some of the places I most like to listen to music, such as on a plane. But hey, it's free and fun, and I bet I'll be using it quite a bit. If you have a Treo and like digital music, you need Pocket Tunes; if you have Pocket Tunes, you should check out GlooNet.

(Side note: Don't even think about trying GlooNet unless you have an all-you-can-eat data plan; I hate to think about the data charges you'd rack up if you were paying by the kilobyte.)

Some of the current quirks of the GlooNet/Pocket Tunes combo may be addressed by Tunesonthefly, an upcoming service from NormSoft based on the GlooNet technology. Here's a press release about it.

Oh, and a Shoutcast tip: If you've got a Treo and Pocket Tunes, and want to listen to Shoutcast streams, don't go to Shoutcast's own site to find stations. Instead, head to TreoBits.com, a site optimized for viewing on Treos--it's got a handy-dandy directiory of Shoutcast programming that's much easier to navigate on a handheld.

Why Not a LifeDriveTreo?

PalmOne's innovative new LifeDrive PDA is getting lots of attention--including some from PC World's own Eric Dahl, who tried out the device and found it an intriguing laptop alternative.

With a big color screen, 4GB of storage, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and lots of bundled software functionality, the LifeDrive has just about everything--except cell-phone capability and a thumb keyboard, both of which are among the defining characteristics of the Treo.

All of which makes me wonder if PalmOne might eventually crossbreed these two product lines to create something that melds the best points of both. More and more, I'm using my Treo as a laptop replacement anyhow, so I'd be interested in a somewhat bulkier phone with a bigger screen and a hard drive...how about you?

The Best Treo Cases

Here's a fun roundup of Treo cases over at Treonauts. It doesn't cover the book-like case I happen to own and use, which works well with one notable exception: If you flip the Treo upside-down, there's a chance it'll tumble out of the case, since it's not fastened in. (I need to try and fix that with a bit of Velcro.)

The Sorry State of Treo Syncing

Back in 1996, the first Palm device had 128KB of memory, a lo-res monochrome screen with no backlighting, and no communications capability beyond its serial port-equipped docking cradle. From a hardware standpoint, today's Treo 650 is an extraordinary improvement in nearly every way (battery life is a big exception!)--but Palm data syncing has barely changed.

The Treo's bundled software still assumes that you'll sync data between the handheld and a PC with a USB cable--or maybe, if you're daring, via Bluetooth. But the Treo's wireless data capability and overall power make it a plausible PC substitute, so assuming that you'll frequently have a PC handy, and only letting you transfer data when you do, seems archaic. What you really want is syncing that happens silently in the background, so you're always up-to-date.

Then there's the fact that Palm's syncing software is still calendar-and-address-book-centric. The Treo does e-mail, Web surfing, music, video, word processing, spreadsheets, digital photography, and...well, just about everything a PC can do. It cries out for wireless syncing that's such a core part of the OS that it doesn't much matter what kind of information you're talking about: The Treo will sync it, without you having to give it much thought.

(The stuff I'm wishing for, by the way, is probably the purview of PalmSource, the company that develops the Palm OS, more than that of Treo manufacturer PalmOne.)

Now, it's true that a bunch of third-party apps fill in some of the Treo's syncing holes. (DataViz's Documents to Go handles Microsoft Office synching like a champ, and it's bundled with the Treo; companies can use products such as Good Technology's GoodLink to do true wireless e-mail and calendaring.) And syncing is enough of a technical challange that no products out there have it completely nailed in every respect, including Treo rivals built on Microsoft's Windows Mobile.

Still, a Treo with superb syncing truly built into its DNA would be a vastly more powerful product. Think we'll get one someday?

Culture in the Middle of Nowhere

I took a long motorcycle trip recently on the back roads of California. At a lunch stop at Tita's Pupuseria (highly recommended, by the way--see photo, below) in Buttonwillow, I was able to use Pocket Tunes to listen to one of my favorite radio stations, WNYC from New York.

Pocket Tunes is on my list of must-have Treo applications, and SHOUTcast is great too, but it would sure be nice if Pocket Tunes let you stream from any Web site. (See the Pocket Tunes interface on my Treo screen, below.)

Treo Speed Test

I've been getting inconsistent connectivity performance with my Treo 650, so I've been checking transmission rates using a mobile bandwidth test at DSL Reports. Here's how DSL Reports describes the test: "We attempt to convince your mobile device to download a measured amount of data, compare this to no data, and calculate your effective latency (time for one request) and effective download speed."

I used the 200k test (the process is shown on the photos of my Treo's screen below), which returned a result of 146 kbps.

When my Treo is cranking, I get speeds over 100 kbps, which feels snappy. When it's at that level, I can listen to radio on SHOUTcast, Nullsoft's Free Winamp-based distributed streaming audio system, which is very cool.

The PDA: Back From the Dead?

For quite awhile, reports on PDA sales has been grim, at least if you're a PDA merchant--they've shown that fewer and fewer people have been buying traditional handhelds. Which isn't really surprising given that the most interesting pocketable computing devices have been converged products that meld PDA and phone functionality, such as the Treo 650.

But research firm Gartner has released a study that says that PDA sales are up 25 percent. The company credits the growth to interest in wireless e-mail, and says that 55 percent of handhelds sold in the first quarter of this year had Wi-Fi or cellular capability.

It also says that PalmOne's market share took a tumble--from 30.5 percent of unit sales in the first quarter of 2004 to 18 percent in the first quarter of 2005. RIM took first place with its BlackBerry models, with 20.8 percent of the market.

From an operating-system standpoint, Gartner says that Palm-based devices made up 40.9 percent of the market a year ago, and only 20 percent today. It says that Windows CE-based devices dominate, with 43 percent of the market.

All of which is interesting...but I keep coming back to the question "What is a PDA?" Gartner says that the Treo 650 isn't one--it's a smartphone--and so it's not included in the above figures. But the figures do include voice-capable devices such as the Nokia 9300 and, I'm guessing, BlackBerries that do both data and voice.

I'm not sure how Gartner divided up the handheld universe into PDAs and smartphones, but I do know that any distinction between the two categories is rapidly disappearing...and I'm curious how PalmOne and Palm-based devices would have fared if the Treo had been included in Gartner's research.

As for my own take: The Treo 650 is a PDA. In fact, it's the best one I've ever owned, in a decade of PDA-owning...

Clean That Treo Screen

I've been a PDA user since, um, 1995, but my Treo 650 seems to need a good screen-cleaning more frequently than any other handheld I've ever owned. (Maybe it's because you always end up pressing your ear to the screen when you use the Treo as a phone--that can't be sanitary.)

Anyhow, my screen was all gunked up, and a moist paper towel didn't make everything right. But on a recent run to CompUSA, I found 3M's Microfiber Notebook Computer Cleaning Cloths. These reusable, nubby little $4 cloths are meant for laptop screens, but they do a terrific job on Treos--I got off stuff that was so tightly fused to the screen that I thought it might be a permanent scratch. Recommended.