Wednesday, October 29, 2003
What can't this thing do?
I just set up Verichat on my Treo. It's like Trillian for Palm OS. It supports Yahoo Messenger, MSN and AIM. It's a little weird "chatting" on this miniscule keyboard but it does the job. Plus, you can take pictures and send them to the people you're chatting with. Kinda cool. The only catch with Verichat is that the chat traffic flows through a proxy server which requires an annual subscription to use. Not expensive but I'm not sure yet that I'd use this enough to warrant the expense.
I've been listening to MP3s on my Treo using Pocket Tunes. Sounds great. I've got a couple of 256 MB SD cards so I can have several albums of music available. I can use regular headphones plugged into the headset jack via an adapter. The battery drain during MP3 playback seems minimal, lower than the drainage while making calls. Pocket Tunes lets you use other applications while the MP3 keeps playing. And you can answer calls which will pause the player. The next release of Pocket Tunes supports ShoutCast streaming audio so listening to radio stations and any other channels in Shoutcast will be possible as well.
The Treo 600 is an interesting union of devices: cell phone, PDA, MP3 player, digital camera, wireless Internet appliance, etc. It's not the best choice for any one of these categories but if you're looking for a single device that does all or most of these jobs, it's probably the best choice for now. There are smaller phones, faster PDAs, better screens, etc. but the Treo strikes the best balance between phone and everything else it does.
For me, the most interesting part is having wireless Internet access in a small general purpose device. Shoutcast support is possible because of Sprint's 3G network, not because this is an MP3 player. Sharing pictures is possible for the same reason. It'll be interesting to see if we get to a point where voice is a secondary aspect of cellular networks. It's just another type of data. VOIP takes that point of view. Why can't I have a high resolution digital camera that can "push" pictures over the Internet? Or a digital music player that can download audio tracks from the Internet (for a fee, of course ;-) without requiring a Macintosh or PC? When does the phone part of the device become optional? And if it does, what's the pricing model for such wireless devices? How many devices do you want to own that can do this? Also, there are many ways to be wireless, Bluetooth and WiFi are also options when you're near other suitable devices or within range of your own wireless network. We'll want devices that will seamlessly choose the best option for moving data around.
I've been listening to MP3s on my Treo using Pocket Tunes. Sounds great. I've got a couple of 256 MB SD cards so I can have several albums of music available. I can use regular headphones plugged into the headset jack via an adapter. The battery drain during MP3 playback seems minimal, lower than the drainage while making calls. Pocket Tunes lets you use other applications while the MP3 keeps playing. And you can answer calls which will pause the player. The next release of Pocket Tunes supports ShoutCast streaming audio so listening to radio stations and any other channels in Shoutcast will be possible as well.
The Treo 600 is an interesting union of devices: cell phone, PDA, MP3 player, digital camera, wireless Internet appliance, etc. It's not the best choice for any one of these categories but if you're looking for a single device that does all or most of these jobs, it's probably the best choice for now. There are smaller phones, faster PDAs, better screens, etc. but the Treo strikes the best balance between phone and everything else it does.
For me, the most interesting part is having wireless Internet access in a small general purpose device. Shoutcast support is possible because of Sprint's 3G network, not because this is an MP3 player. Sharing pictures is possible for the same reason. It'll be interesting to see if we get to a point where voice is a secondary aspect of cellular networks. It's just another type of data. VOIP takes that point of view. Why can't I have a high resolution digital camera that can "push" pictures over the Internet? Or a digital music player that can download audio tracks from the Internet (for a fee, of course ;-) without requiring a Macintosh or PC? When does the phone part of the device become optional? And if it does, what's the pricing model for such wireless devices? How many devices do you want to own that can do this? Also, there are many ways to be wireless, Bluetooth and WiFi are also options when you're near other suitable devices or within range of your own wireless network. We'll want devices that will seamlessly choose the best option for moving data around.
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