Compare for size
by Volker Weber
I posted a few quick and blurry photos of various smartphones on Flickr to give you an idea of how small the Pearl is compared to other contemporary phones. You will also see that the Palm Treo 750 will have a hard time competing with the BlackBerrys. The 8707 has a better keyboard and the 8100 is way smaller, while they all have a similar function set.
Comments
I actually use a treo 650 & I still believe that the form factor isn't so important. The screen resolutions are today still too low for real daily business work. The 320x480 of my old clie NR70V was much better. Why? The Clie had a cristal clear display & special, small fonts which worked very well with QuickSheet & the eMail app.
If you really want to use email, quicksheet, office & web browsing for daily work you'll need a higher resolution, much higher than the Treo 320x320.
To get a higher resolution in the smartphone package you'll need more space for the display, maybe the complete surface.
Today the Treo line has a 320x320 display and if I compare that size/resolution with the old Sony Clie's they should be able to get a 480x480 resolution (current form factor). If you remove the keyboard you should get a 720x480 resolution (I would prefer today) but I also want the keyboard.
So you'll need a hinge a the bottom with a foldable keyboard & mic similiar to the Sonyericsson 990i but unfortunatelly they use it for a foldable phonekeyboard.
That's the only way you'll have a chance to read & work with normal websites, emails, officedocs especially sheets.
So size is not everything! Performance, usability & ease of use are as important as an established solution/developer community which can improve the product to a new level.
Most of the things you can read about smartphones are symbian OS, which is still slow, and Microsoft with a complex UI. Most of the daily business activities for symbian & MS smartphones need at least one more click/tap than the old, reliable palm os.
Slightly OT:
I recently came across the mobile backup service ZYB https://zyb.com and think it´s very useful esp. for migrating between phones without SyncML.
Of course it´s not sufficient for you high-end Blackberry caste, but I searched for this kind of service for quite some time and thus consider it interesting enough for the rest of us to earn a honorable mention on an A-blog. Just a thought.
