Sprint Plans to Be First with the Treo 650
612595
Sprint announced plans today be the first wireless carrier to offer the new palmOne Treo 650. The Treo 650 will be available next month at Sprint Stores, Sprint business channels and online for $599.
708049
(InfoWorld) - Palm Inc. began taking orders for its Treo 680 smartphone on Wednesday, hoping to expand from its core business customers to a larger market of casual, first-time users. Palm is charging US$399 for the "unlocked" version of the phone, allowing users to subscribe to any carrier, and plans to begin shipping the phones shortly after Dec. 1. One carrier has already announced a plan for the phone -- Cingular Wireless LLC will begin selling the Treo 680 for $199 on Friday. Palm hopes to attract a new demographic by designing the Treo 680 with an internal antenna, making it slimmer than previous models, and offering it in four colors, according to a statement by John Hartnett, Palm's senior vice president of global markets. In another bid for those casual customers, Palm has moved beyond purely business functions, and will offer entertainment applications like the ability to show Flash-based movies such as those seen on the YouTube Web site, and to play MP3 songs through a 30-day trial of Yahoo Inc.'s mobile, digital music service. New users might also appreciate the Google Maps function, which offers personalized driving directions or addresses for nearby restaurants. "Location-based services hold great promise in a wide variety of areas, such as helping friends find each other, helping advertisers more effectively target prospects, and even ensuring that no man ever has to stop for directions again," said Avi Greengart, principal analyst for mobile devices with Current Analysis. As a phone, the Palm OS-based device operates on the GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications), GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) and EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution) networks. Palm hopes the Treo 680 will help it to grow beyond its roots in the slow-growing PDA (personal digital assistant) market, and claim a greater share of the burgeoning smartphone industry. Smartphone shipments worldwide grew 75.5 percent to 34.7 million units in the first half of 2006, according to research firm Gartner Inc. In comparison, PDA sales grew only 5.7 percent to 7.4 million units. North America is the only region where PDAs continue to outsell smartphones, so Palm hopes its new product has arrived in U.S. markets in time to catch a wave of people upgrading to the new technology. With only 5 percent of the worldwide market for combined PDA and smartphone markets, Palm needs the Treo 680 to be a financial success in order to compete with its larger rivals. Nokia Corp. is the largest vendor, with 42 percent market share, followed by Research in Motion Ltd. with 6.5 percent and Motorola Inc. with 5.3 percent, according to Gartner. Posting strong sales through the holiday season will be crucial for that plan, as Gartner predicts smartphones sales will continue to rise, totaling 81 million for the full year of 2006. That growth will be fueled by a jump in consumer demand, focused on individual details like fashion and multimedia, according to a statement by Gartner analyst Roberta Cozza. Â
259748
palmOne gets a little upset when people call the Treo 650 just an &quot;evolution&quot; of the Treo 600. They insist that it is indeed a step up the ladder and not just a leg lift towards that next step.
372660
Almost a year after Sprint Nextel Corp. disclosed it would develop a mobile broadband network using WiMax technology, the wireless provider said yesterday it is teaming up with competing provider Clearwire Corp. to help build it.
518827
Bringing the price-fight to Windows Mobile Review Palm's Treo 650 smart phone has spearheaded Palm's smart-phone business since its debut in the US in October 2004. Still, it's looking long in the tooth, especially after Palm shipped the Windows Mobile-based 700w and its Palm OS sibling, the 700p, earlier this year. But rather than ditch the older product, Palm's re-modelled it as a new handset, the 680, pitched at a lower price...â¦
416203
Chinese phone maker ZTE Corp   said it is in talks with Sprint Nextel  about  supplying the No. 3 U.S. mobile service with a range of  handsets for a high-speed wireless service it is planning based  on WiMax.
396756
PalmOne this week is announcing the Treo 650, a hybrid PDA/mobile phone device that addresses many of the shortcomings of its hugely popular predecessor, the Treo 600.
654490
A finer, mellow blend of phone and PDA, PalmOne launched the Treo 650 in the US yesterday. There are changes on the outside and changes on the inside - some cosmetic, some ergonomic, and some fundamentally technical.
405829
PalmOne Inc.&#39;s long-awaited update to the Treo 600 will come with a new processor, sharper display and flash memory, as the company continues to improve its flagship product.
97456
Palm has announced its first non-touchscreen smartphone for Windows Mobile 6. Beginning in October, the Treo 500v will be available to Vodafone customers in Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, the UK, and South Africa.
319267
PalmOne is aiming to sharpen up its image with the launch of the Treo 650 on Monday. As previously reported, the smart phone update has a higher-resolution screen and a faster processor than the previous top-of-the-line model, the Treo 600.
247114
(InfoWorld) - Sprint Nextel plans to cooperate with enterprises on the rollout of its WiMax mobile broadband network, letting the customers install and own short-range base stations in their buildings with automatic roaming onto the carrier's WiMax network outside. Enterprises will be a big market for the WiMax service, said Atish Gude, senior vice president of mobile broadband operations at Sprint, in an interview Wednesday at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. The service, planned for a national rollout next year under the Xohm brand name, is designed to deliver Internet access at megabits per second on a standards-based technology that has been heavily promoted by Intel. For enterprises, it will be similar to Wi-Fi, only more secure and with easy roaming onto a carrier network that spans whole metropolitan areas, Gude said. Sprint has sent out an RFP (request for proposals) for WiMax femtocells, or miniature base stations meant to serve a home or other small area, Gude confirmed. He expects large enterprises to buy and deploy femtocells for consistent coverage across their offices and campuses, maintaining control over them as they do with current Wi-Fi networks. Sprint will work with enterprises and building owners to provide roaming onto the carrier network from WiMax femtocells or, in some cases, indoor Wi-Fi networks, he said. The small cells won't be needed in homes because the main network will be able to deliver good in-home coverage by itself, according to Gude. Earlier this week, Sprint started selling femtocells for its CDMA (Code-Division Multiple Access) phone network in a trial rollout aimed at homes. The carrier and its partner, wireless broadband company Clearwire, will run Xohm on licensed spectrum but plan a business model far different from that of 3G mobile data offerings. Customers will be able to use Xohm for any type of application on the Internet, and client devices will be sold at retail stores without the subsidies mobile operators typically provide for phones. The technology could be included in a wide range of devices including handhelds, cameras, and even cars, the companies said. WiMax will go into future notebooks through Intel's Echo Peak chipset, a module for the company's next-generation Montevina platform for notebooks, which Intel announced Wednesday. Lenovo, Toshiba, Acer, and other manufacturers have said they will include WiMax in notebooks in 2008, according to Intel. Montevina notebooks are to hit the market in May. Although WiMax devices will be up against 3G products that are subsidized by carriers, the ability to buy the device separately from the service will be a real advantage, Insight64 analyst Nathan Brookwood said. Consumers don't like having to sign up for a two-year mobile plan as they typically do in the U.S. before they even know whether the carrier's service works in their homes. And notebooks, for example, sell without subsidies today, he pointed out. Xohm will be sold in a variety of ways, including monthly subscriptions, short on-the-spot purchases and "try-and-buy" offers with a period of free service, the companies said. They haven't disclosed pricing. Together, Sprint and Clearwire plan to reach 100 million U.S. residents next year, in about 30 markets including some small cities. Sprint plans to have trials in place in Chicago and the Baltimore-Washington, D.C., area by the end of this year. Clearwire already has a pre-standard network with about 300,000 customers across the country and plans to deploy standard mobile WiMax in the Portland, Oregon, area in the first half of next year. It is running a trial there now.
147177
(InfoWorld) - The groundwork is being laid for a risky experiment in consumer electronics as manufacturers prepare for Sprint Nextel and Clearwire's Xohm WiMax service. Motorola unveiled a WiMax client chipset on Tuesday and praised Sprint's strategy of leaving WiMax clients to device makers and retailers. But that plan, a change of pace from U.S. carriers' usual practice of selling and subsidizing phones themselves, could take years to pay off in the mass market. The chipset, introduced at WiMax World USA in Chicago, is small, economical, and more power-efficient than 3G platforms, according to Gary Koerper, Motorola's vice president of platform planning and architecture. It will hit the market in client devices in the second half of 2008, with the company initially focusing on building WiMax phones that carry its own brand, he said. The devices will be offered for various WiMax services around the world, including Xohm. With Xohm, Motorola will have free rein to make whatever kind of device it wants as long as it's certified to work on the carrier's network, Koerper said. Motorola calls that great news, but some observers see a hard road ahead with device makers or carriers pushing an alternative to carrier-subsidized phones. "The model Sprint is pursuing is really taking the shackles off Motorola innovation and Motorola's brand," Koerper said. Typically, the world's second-largest mobile phone maker has to develop a new product and then get a carrier to buy in on it. With WiMax devices designed to work with Xohm, Motorola can look straight to the consumer and build what they want. This could make it easier for Motorola to compete with Apple's hot iPhone, he said. Apple's product has stolen the thunder from Motorola's popular Razr line even though it commands a full, unsubsidized price. Sprint's whole WiMax initiative is a risky bid to gain an edge in the U.S. mobile market, where Sprint is in third place by subscribers. The technology promises a fat pipe to the Internet that subscribers can take with them all over a metropolitan area. Motorola said its chipset offers 10Mbps downstream and 3 to 4Mbps upstream, far faster than current 3G and comparable to a cable modem. But it will take more than fast Internet access to attract and keep paying customers, said Albert Lin, an analyst at American Technology Research. There are other ways to get fast data service, and there will be more in the future, so Sprint needs to create attractive services such as a VoIP application, high-quality video content, and easy tools for professionals to access corporate networks over VPNs, Lin said. Ease of use, support, and coverage will also be key because cellular services already have those established, he added. "You don't automatically get hundreds of thousands of early adopters," Lin said. The lack of a subsidy isn't even the biggest concern for vendors trying to sell devices for such a service, but it is a long-term problem, he said. Although down from about 95 percent a few years ago, the percentage of phones sold with subsidies in the U.S. is still 85 percent or more, according to Lin. Worldwide, about half of all cell phones are sold with subsidies, he said. As people look for more special features on their phones, they are looking outside of carriers' offerings more often, but it will be three years before the average U.S. consumer will want an unsubsidized phone, Lin predicted. Len Lauer, an executive vice president at mobile technology giant Qualcomm, was also pessimistic in an interview earlier this year. He doesn't think the mobile industry can be transformed by new strategies like Sprint's nor by the any-device, any-service band planned for the 700MHz wireless spectrum to be auctioned next year. U.S. consumers are too addicted to subsidies to buy many devices sold outside the carrier channel, said Lauer, a former Sprint executive. Motorola is pitching its chipset as competitive with 3G instead of an expensive, futuristic new technology. The cost of the chipset is already low and will keep falling to the point that Motorola could soon bring the chipset to inexpensive phones to be used primarily for voice in developing markets, Koerper said. The chipset, consisting of a baseband modem and a radio reference design, has been tested and verified with WiMax network infrastructure from Motorola and other leading vendors, the company said.
10296
Taking pre-orders Palm has begun taking orders from Europeans for its upcoming Treo 680 Palm OS-based smart phone. The updated stubless and RoHS-compliant version of the Treo 650 will retail for Â£329 inc VAT if you want one unallied to any specific mobile phone network.â¦
608990
Sprint Nextel Corp , which recently  said it would spend up to $5 billion on a mobile high-speed  wireless standard by 2010, said it had awarded the New York  WiMax market to Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. .
572862
(InfoWorld) - Sprint Nextel's ambitious Xohm WiMax vision will be based on a radical change in the way users pay for the service compared with cellular plans. Users will sign up for wireless broadband for a day, a month, or a year without a contract tied to a specific device. Payment could be made via a credit card wirelessly. The pricing approach, described in broad strokes by Sprint chief technology officer Barry West Wednesday at WiMax World in Chicago, will be designed on the principle of "affordable" broadband and "around the needs of the individual," he said in an interview. That approach breaks down the concept now seen with cellular plans, in which users typically buy a two-year contract in part to subsidize the cost of a single mobile device that a user is locked into using. A Sprint spokesman explained that the proposed pricing will rely on subscriptions, but not contracts in the sense associated with typical cellular contracts. And the longer the subscription a customer buys, the cheaper the service will be, he said. West said Sprint will announce pricing early next year, but also said it will probably be based on tiers of service. The cost of devices, such as laptop cards able to transmit mobile WiMax, will approximate the cost of a 3G broadband laptop card today, he said. In response to a question from an audience member, West also said that Xohm will not be backed by what the industry calls service-level agreements, a kind of guarantee that a minimum bandwidth will be provided or the customer receives a refund. "We will give you a good experience, but not SLAs," West said. Several Sprint executives have described Xohm WiMax speeds that are expected to be 2Mbps to 4Mbps, although the technology is capable of 10Mbps. At a demonstration onboard a moving tour boat on the Chicago River Tuesday night using Motorola gear, mobile WiMax shared across 12 laptops and cell phones was clocked at 2.5Mbps downward. West noted that the demonstration was across only one channel, and that Sprint will be able to offer many channels to handle users at a single antenna site, offering plenty of bandwidth for many users. West, who calls himself a technology "pragmatist," said he does not envision any hidden technology bugaboos in the nationwide rollout of Xohm planned for next year. In the next three years, he has predicted 50 million devices, such as laptops and mobile phones, will be WiMax-certified. Getting the certification process for interoperability in order will be difficult, but he said that even if there are 100,000 different devices, it is conceivable all of them could be served from only 10 different chip sets. "That's not unmanageable," he said. By contrast, West said Xohm's biggest challenge will be servicing the needs of 210 million Internet users in the United States alone, and meeting their demands for access, applications, and services. In his keynote, West said some critics have already begun to question whether West's predictions for Xohm's growth are too ambitious. He said commercial rollouts are still on schedule for the second quarter of 2008, and work has begun on 10,000 base stations nationally, with 20,000 WiMax antennas. The initial rollout in Chicago and Baltimore/Washington in December is "pretty much on target," he added. As for competition, West said he doesn't see Verizon Wireless or AT&T.
252268
Sprint Nextel Corp , said on  Wednesday it would kick off a new advertising campaign