Palm to retail vanilla Treo Pro in Australia from Nov 16; will not adopt fancy WM shells

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If you’re from down under and want a Palm Treo Pro but aren’t the biggest fan of the dollar-thirsty telephone operator known as Telstra, then you don’t have to wait too long now before getting your hands on a vanilla Treo Pro in the shops. Speaking to some Palm representatives at TechEd Australia, they’ve told me that the Treo Pro will officially be available via electronic retailers as a vanilla unlocked phone on Sunday, 16th of November for AU$900.

At the same time I also asked about why hasn’t Palm developed or customized the Windows Mobile shell much for the device – the “bread and butter” of HTC. The representative said that this decision was on purpose and believes that fancy shells usually consume too much memory resources slowing down the user experience, whereas the Treo Pro idles at only around 30-40% memory usage compared to as high as 70% on a HTC Touch Diamond. Whether or not this tradeoff between fanciness and resource usage will pay off for Palm remains to be seen.

5 insightful thoughts

  1. Sounds interesting, I’ll have to have a look tomorrow between sessions. I’ve been thinking of getting the Nokia E71, but this Palm is probably worth a look.

    Good to see project SOAK represented at Tech Ed!

  2. Just recently got the AT&T Tilt and love it. We’re supposed to get WinMob 6.1 soon too, so I’m excited for that. 🙂

  3. On the HTC Touch Diamond memory usage, my mrs has one and RAM usage is around 30% (she rarely leaves things running in the background). With my HTC Touch Pro, which I do leave things running in the background, its usually around 50%.

    It’ll jump higher playing back a large MP3 or video, the highest I’ve seen on mine is 78% when listening to a 60MB podcast, but it’ll fall back off when media player stops playing the file.

  4. AU$900 for a Palm? Is that a joke? Palm is dreaming! For that price, there are better choices to go with (i.e. Blackberry or HTC). The only way Palm can survive is pumping out more el cheapo devices like the Centro. Palm doesn’t need to hire any more engineers, but they need some hard core marketing and finance guys to figure out pricing properly.

  5. My brother´s got the Diamond and I flashed him a custom ROM, so the ROM usage decreased by ~10%. By the way, theres an option to close (not minimize) programs when clicking on the “x” button, so theres always enough memory.

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