More Treo 650 Rumors
A user on TreoCentral posted some more pictures of a Sprint-branded Treo 650, the successor to the Treo 600. Most of the pictures are pretty blurry, so I’m not sure if that is meant to keep people from seeing things that may reveal something that they don’t want to be public yet, but if this is the case, why are the pictures available at all? Seems like it’s just to create more buzz, which of course it has! There’s not a whole lot new that these pictures uncover over what has already been rumored. The only new piece of information is that the battery has more capacity than that of the Treo 600, but with a higher-resolution display, that extra capacity is needed!
There is a link from that post to one on PDAPhoneHome where a user talks about playing with a pre-production model, also from Sprint (The Treo 600 initially came out on Sprint, but was soon available on at least a couple of other carriers and eventually made it to all major U.S. carriers except Nextel). A couple of items listed in this second post caught my eye. For one, the phone has RealPlayer built in. This may mean that live video streaming over a mobile web connection may be possible. At the current lower speeds of such a connection, the quality will be pretty poor, but then again on such a small screen, the blurriness from a highly compressed stream won’t be as noticeable. On a similar note, there appears to be support for a new service called Mobitv. This is an additional $10/month service that provides downloadable clips from a number of television sources, like MSNBC, CNBC, Fox Sports, etc. Unfortunately it appears it’s only available via Sprint, probably because they currently support higher speed connections than the GSM carriers. But having RealPlayer may actually skirt around this issue and actually provide a much wider array of content which doesn’t cost extra, except perhaps in terms of additional data fees.
This brings me to a related issue around using phones like the Treo. Much of what I do with the phone – email, web, instant messaging – is very data-intensive, meaning that I am using the special data services to communicate as opposed to the phone. Mobile carriers differ somewhat in their voice plans, but the differences are not huge. One might pay 10% or 20% more on one carrier for a similar number of minutes, but it doesn’t get much worse. This is of course in the U.S. market, I have no clue about how markets outside of the U.S. compare. Anyway, with data services, the picture is different. Mobile phones in general, but PDA Phones like the Treo in particular are becoming more and more data-intensive. Some carriers have made this functionality relatively pain-free to deal with, offering unlimited data and relatively low rates. But others offer such plans at rates that will double your bill, or worse. One plan I saw was actually 400% higher for unlimited data than another. Sprint doesn’t even offer unlimited data, it seems, but even a limited 300MB is $80! Sprint does have higher data speeds, but still. With number portability and data becoming more of a mainstream feature, this disparity between carriers has got to change. Mobile phones are still used primarily for making calls, but soon enough this will be only half of the picture for a majority of users. Customers who view such capabilities as essential will look at the savings of $50 per month or more between carriers and the decision to switch will be a very easy one. Perhaps the carriers who are charging the highest fees aren’t seeing that much interest in data services, but couldn’t this be due to the fact that people who are as a matter of course end up going to the cheapest carriers for such services?