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Handhelds IT Hardware

Palm and RIM to Collaborate on Treo Software 71

Posted by Hemos from the what's-the-sound-of-two-hand(helds)-clapping dept.
Rayaru writes "Palm and RIM have apparantly signed a deal allowing the Treo 650 to use RIM's email software. "The partnership with RIM is unique in that it is Palm's first chance to give Treo customers automatic synchronisation with calendaring." It's interesting that the deal also includes "future Treo products with the Palm operating system." Perhaps a Treo 670 Palm version is in the works?"
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Palm and RIM to Collaborate on Treo Software More

Palm and RIM to Collaborate on Treo Software

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  • Good Move (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jamesgamble ( 917138 ) on Monday October 17, 2005 @11:03AM (#13809662) Homepage
    This is a really good move on both sides. RIM's software is proven, while their hardware still has some crazy quirks. Palms hardware is proven, as is Palm OS, but a combination of the two pieces will make a great product.

    • Re:Good Move (Score:1, Troll)

      by doublem ( 118724 )
      Palms hardware is proven, as is Palm OS

      Let me guess, you're using a Palm III or Palm V device, aren't you?

      If so, then I could see your point, but if you're talking about the newer kit, then I'd have to ask what planet you're on, and how you get that unstable crap to sync without crashing and requiring a plethora of hardware resets.

      • Re:Good Move (Score:2, Insightful)

        by 3TimeLoser ( 853209 )
        I hate PDAs and I have to support several of them (Palm & Blackberry). Those little bastards can take up more time and cause more interruptions than most of the servers I deal with.

        However, the beauty of the Blackberry (with a BES sever on the backend) is that desktop sync is not necessary for mail & calendar. It's all managed at the server, happens over the air, and it's one less thing to deal with at the desktop. Add this to the Treo 650 and you have a pretty potent combination. Now, some Tre
        • That's why I used Goodlink. I worked with BES, and Goodlink was far less work to manage and did away with the desktop sync long before RIM did. (back with the Rim 950 and 957 was common and Goodlink used their hardware). Goodlink has been availible on the Treo for quite some time as well.
          • I've also heard good things about Goodlink. I looked into it when we only had a couple of Treos, but it did not work with Lotus Notes (at the time, anyway). After that, we had a management change and the new boss came with a Blackberry. Thus it was decreed that we'll be a Blackberry shop.

            Oh well...
    • Palm and RIM are smart enough to realize that simplicity could be thier greatest asset. Let Windows based handhelds have all the toys while the business world sucks up units that can perform the necessary day to day functions reliably with minimal power consumption. If you want toys, add a way to store photos of your kids (great to show to customers/clients on the road) or an MP3 player to listen while stuck in the airport.

      If I want to play video games or watch movies, I'll go with something that has a bi

    • Re:Good Move (Score:3, Informative)

      by Eric Giguere ( 42863 )

      Note that this announcement is for BlackBerry Connect, which essentially gives Palm access to the protocols that BlackBerry devices use to talk to the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES). You still end up using the Treo's mail client -- the actual BlackBerry software (which is all written in Java and runs on top of RIM's own VM implementation) is not part of this deal. (That's covered by a different program called BlackBerry Built-In, which includes the VM and everything needed to run the standard BlackBerry

    • Re:Good Move (Score:3, Funny)

      by Val314 ( 219766 )
      and if any manager has something to say, the'll end up with RIM's Hardware and Palm's software (emulated under WinCE)

  • Patents? (Score:5, Informative)

    by anonicon ( 215837 ) on Monday October 17, 2005 @11:04AM (#13809667)
    I may have missed something, but wasn't RIM's Blackberry software found to infringe on a software patent held by someone else, and they were ordered to shut down their wireless e-mail service in the United States? I'm wondering if they will be developing software based on the patented tech that RIM was already slapped down for.

  • Palm goes both ways (Score:4, Interesting)

    by skitheboat ( 901329 ) * on Monday October 17, 2005 @11:05AM (#13809672) Homepage
    Could Palm have a strategy that is any more confusing? I hope that they have some master plan in all of this and that it doesn't leave out making their hardware (smart phones) more reliable. Mine crashes more than Windows and my friends in on his 5th one. I can't imagine how they can improve quality when working on so many platforms.
    • Palm's strategy is simple. They used to make decent, reliable devices. Now, they just make crap that crashes on a regular basis and scrambles user data.

      They had two options.

      They could have rallied and done their best to return to the days of producing quality devices worth the money.

      Instead, they chose to ride on the value of their brand name, coasting until they run out of steam.

      The company is on a long, slow death march, and the quality of their recent products demonstrates that.

      This is just another cyn

    • Re:Palm goes both ways (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Lumpy ( 12016 )
      wierd I have the exact opposite eperience..

      my Treo 600 is rock solid. my Journada was nothing but a reboot moster that ended up smashed and thrown in a drawer the 12th time it lost everything just when I needed to use it.

      I can not stand pocketPC devices while ever cince I switched to palm with Sony and then to the treo, I have yet to be disappointed. I even run unstable software. I watch mpeg4 videos on my treo every day and that app people mention about crashes due to the beta software.

      There really is n
      • My 650 crashes constantly, and my dell axim does as well :)
        • After 3 stages of support I got to a high-level support person at Verizon and he said they see far more problems with all of the combo devices than phones only. It's still just too tough to pack the combined functionality and get a reliable product. Some will work just fine but the stars really have to align.
          • I might believe that... if the "PDA only" devices were actually stable as well. I dunno. I've used devices based on Symbian OS that didn't reboot themselves constantly or do a soft reboot when a phone call ended ... and then rebooted again with the radio off, and then again with the radio on.

            I'm no longer interested in anything that runs Palm OS and not particularly interested in anything from Palm. My Treo650 has been a marginal buy at best and Palm isn't interested (or hasn't shown any interest) in making

  • Yoinks... (Score:5, Funny)

    by gowen ( 141411 ) <gwowen@gmail.com> on Monday October 17, 2005 @11:06AM (#13809679) Homepage Journal
    Palm and RIM to collaborate?

    Look, there are those of us looking to make a cheap, sexually explicit joke about the headline and get some (+5 Funny) love.

    But guys, you're just not making it difficult enough anymore.

  • Good (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Wireless Joe ( 604314 ) on Monday October 17, 2005 @11:08AM (#13809685) Homepage
    "...unique in that it is Palm's first chance to give Treo customers automatic synchronization with calendaring."
    Maybe I didn't understand this statement, but I have always had automatic calendar sync, albeit with GoodLink software.

    • Re:Good (Score:3, Informative)

      by topham ( 32406 )
      Palm was going to include this functionality before, but (if I recall correctly) RIM sued them over a patent violation.

      Amusing considering RIMs current legal problems with patents.

    • Re:Good (Score:3, Informative)

      by Darkforge ( 28199 )
      They mean automatic "push" synchronization, where your phone's calendar and e-mail are updated wirelessly over the cellular network. That's where the Blackberry has the default Treo beat. (Though there is a really nice piece of non-free software called Chatter [chatteremail.com] that can do push e-mail for the Treo 650 with IMAP servers like fastmail [fastmail.fm]).
      • They mean automatic "push" synchronization, where your phone's calendar and e-mail are updated wirelessly over the cellular network.

        GoodLink provides this as well. [good.com]
        Of course, GoodLink is a third-party solution, but it works well with many models of phones, so it could be worth it if only because you are not tied down to a particular brand.

  • With any luck... (Score:5, Funny)

    by MoxCamel ( 20484 ) on Monday October 17, 2005 @11:08AM (#13809691)
    Hopefully this will lead to more Palm and RIM jobs. The world needs more Palm and RIM jobs...

    Mox

  • Support for open source calendar servers? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by IGnatius T Foobar ( 4328 ) on Monday October 17, 2005 @11:10AM (#13809709) Homepage Journal
    Ideally, I would like to see this fancy new combined software package contain support for either SyncML [phonescoop.com] or GroupDAV [groupdav.org]. It would be nice to connect to open source calendar servers, using a sync server like Sync4J [sync4j.org] or even natively on standards-compliant calendar servers [citadel.org].
  • From what I read, it will sync Mail and Cal. People are getting used to the latest Blackberry Enterprise server, which also does Contacts and Tasks. MS Outlook 2003 Exchange + Mobile 5 (read: Treo 700) will support Mail/Cal/Con/Task/Notes. If this really is only e-mail and Cal, it's not enough IMO and people will flock to Treo 700 because they want "all of outlook" and not "some of it".

    Palm has also said this was in the works for well over a year and a half, with no resolution. What gives that they fina
    • Palm has also said this was in the works for well over a year and a half, with no resolution. What gives that they finally got this out the door, all-be-it in a feature-missing version?

      The stock price must be slipping. Since they don't have anything like a stable, reliable product to release, they have to announce a new feature.

      If it works as well as the rest of the Palm OS, then we can expect it to crash regularly, and a non-trivial percentage of the e-mail to vanish into the ether.

  • still "synchronizing" with desktops? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Douglas Simmons ( 628988 ) on Monday October 17, 2005 @11:23AM (#13809792) Homepage
    I'm thinking that by now these devices are advanced enough and people are dependent on them to the point that coordination with a "primary" unit at home with the on-the-go device is getting phased out.

    By the way, way back I remember a slashdot article about a thing you hook up to a PDA that projects a laser keyboard onto any flat surface, and with it you can type away and it would somehow detect which non-existing keys you're hitting. Are they any good (if they're still being sold that is)?

  • I've been hearing rumors and people running "Treo RIM Betas" for some time now - at least when I finally got my Treo 650 (and luckily, I don't seem to have some of the reset problems some have, but I will admit at least once a week - usually when I'm surfing the web - it reboots itself).

    So if they want to announce this for 2006 that's fine, but are we talking "early because we're almost done" or "We're just going to do it sometime 2006 and we're just yankin' your chain again because we're really just going

  • big words are hard to sp3|| (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    >Palm and RIM have apparantly
    "apparantly" is not a valid spelling. One should use "apparently".

    Please, don't become just another statistic.
    >>Results 1 - 10 of about 1,390,000 for apparantly
    >>Results 1 - 10 of about 110,000,000 for apparently

  • Palm - Mail and Calendar SYnc (Score:4, Interesting)

    by futuresheep ( 531366 ) on Monday October 17, 2005 @11:40AM (#13809899) Journal
    We've been using the Intellisync Mobile Suite for our enterprise users with great success. The client does an excellent job of providing email/calendar/contact sync via sms push. It's almost as fast as the Blackberry's we support, depending more on the users phone provider than on our Intellisync server.
  • Don't you mean future RIM products with Palm OS? Or Future Treo Products with RIM e-mail or OS?

  • Is there anything particular about the Treo 650 that would prevent using the Blackberry e-mail stuff on the Treo 600? Inquiring Treo 600 users want to know!
  • (besides slashdot readers have to deal with (palm/rim)job jokes):
    Chattermail [chatteremail.com]

    Great little program that got me through 2 years of Treo use.
  • So if Palm was going to choose an OS, you'd have thought that they'd have picked something that allowed them to differentiate and to control their own destiny. An OS like embedded Linux, or Symbian perhaps. But no, they had to move to the only OS I suspect I'm going to have hard time syncing my Mac with; the same one used by every other freaking PDA phone out there (all of which suck).

    And, now they add insult to injury by emphasizing the Blackberry software, and if -- in the process -- they make it "har

  • verbificationicity (Score:1, Informative)

    by RumbaFlex ( 465472 )
    calendaring - daring to calen?
    language is raped on a daily basis..
    just remember that fist can be a verb without verbification.

    -
  • But this sounds shit hot! Do you know how long I have been eyeballing a Treo, only to take pause when looking at RIM devices? A long, long time. Long time.
  • There's a great email program for Palm-powered smartphones (like the Treo 650) called ChatterMail (http://www.chatteremail.com/ [chatteremail.com]) that works as you'd expect with POP3 mail servers, but given an IMAP server, you can have email pushed to your treo as it arrives, normally within a few seconds.

    The whole experience is pretty much just like Blackberry mail, except it is on a versitle hardware platform (heh heh heh).

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