You did not read it here

by Volker Weber

Thanks all for reminding me that the gizmo sites are abuzz with specs for a new Treo.

You have not read it here. Did I overlook the news? You bet I did not. But if you think about it, you hardly ever see me writing about things that may or may not happen a couple of months down the road. Why is that? Because it is a bad thing.

You can spend your whole life sitting and waiting for this really good gizmo that will be available in six months. As you get there you will then hear, that this really good thing will soon be replaced with this really, really good whizbang. I have some friends who spent years waiting for computers to get cheaper. Each time it happened they assumed that if they waited it would be even less expensive. That worked really well if you don't look at the fact that they did not have a computer all that time.

That being said, you can have a very bad timing. If you buy anyting from Apple a week before Steve Jobs has a keynote, you may be buying old stuff for premium prices. But I have made the mistake just last year, that I told somebody who was ready getting an iMac for Christmas to wait for the January conference. The iMac was old at that time and I expected a replacement. Did not happen in January. Not in February. Nor in March. In April my friend bought a PC.

Now about the Treo. A few hours after I received my box I sat down and wrote about my first impressions. It was quite obvious that there are a number of areas that need improvement: Bluetooth and screen were the two most obvious. How obvious must they be for the engineers that built the machine, if I can sum them up after a short look? And what are they doing? They are working on it. And chances are that the next device will have all those improvements.

So, when the new device is out, you can certainly expect me to write about it. If I can get my hands on one. But today I am enjoying the 600. I am not telling anybody to hold off his purchase because there will be a new one in the future. Of course there will. But the worst thing you can do today is to look at the specs, then wait a little, wait some more, then decide you can't wait, and you really need all those features. Then you end up buying some crappy phone that has all the checkbox features.

Vendors tell me all the time about things they are working on. Some trust I will not write about them. If they don't know me long enough they will ask me to sign a non-disclosure agreement first.

Comments

Old vowe.net archive pages

I explain difficult concepts in simple ways. For free, and for money. Clue procurement and bullshit detection.

vowe

Paypal vowe