The Treo 500v is the first full revision to the Treo hardware from Palm in years. It is a new Windows Mobile 6 standard smartphone that abandons touchscreen interactivity, but adds Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR with the HFP, HSP, A2DP, and OPP profiles, a 2 Megapixel camera and 150 MB of usable memory that can be expanded with a microSD card. As with previous generations of Treos, it has a full QWERTY keyboard and large screen. It will support Microsoft’s Direct Push email as well as POP3 email accounts. It is a tri-band GSM/GPRS phone, supporting the 900/1800/1900 bands as well as UMTS 2100 3G. Palm will likely release a variant of the 500v that supports US networks at a later date. It is available in white and gray.

I rolled with a Treo 650 for a couple of years, but got to the point where I realized that it didn’t do *anything* as well as my Blackberry except take pictures. So I sold the sucker on Ebay, got a spiffy camera phone and upgraded my Blackberry and never looked back. I’ve been a fan of the Palm OS since way back in the day (the Palm 300 was my first) but as has been well documented elsewhere they just haven’t kept up with the Joneses, or in their case the RIM’s. There’s been talk of a new ground-up revision of the Palm OS for ages now, but this Windows Mobile release seems more like a capitulation than anything else.

Just eyeballing the picture it looks like the keyboard is less cramped. That was one of the worst things about the Treo 650 IMO–the keyboard was almost unusable for a grown ass man with respectable sized hands. Considering that even after two years of use I never achieved anywhere near the keyboard fluency that I reached in just a few weeks of Blackberry use some work on the keyboard design was definitely necessary.

Also, as the blurb above indicates, the touch screen/stylus interactivity has been abandoned. I have a soft spot for the classic Palm data entry method, and am concerned that my Palm “graffiti” writing skills are now completely irrelevant but it definitely makes sense. The Treo 650 just didn’t offer the one handed functionality that the Blackberry does and–particularly with third party aps–you’d have to whip out the stylus at very inopportune times.

Palm Announces Treo 500v for Vodafone @ PhoneScoop

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