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New Treo, lower power but colour display?

Attentive reading of filings for FCC approval have revealed that although Handspring's Treo is still barely launched in the markets, its designer is already preparing its replacement.

In a preview of the Treo 270 by ZDNet reporter Rupert Goodwins, the FCC documentation, supplied by Handspring in order to get a broadcast licence for the pocket PDA/phone, reveals that it will acknowledge the complaints of reviewers such as our own Chris Comley who have wondered whether it is really necessary to have a monochrome display.

In his preview, Goodwins surprisingly predicts that the new colour display will not degrade battery life, but improve it. Normally, a colour screen uses far more power than an LCD monochrome display, even when you have a touch-sensitive overlay soaking up the battery.

Industry sources say that until the device appears on the market, it won't be clear whether this is because Treo has not included a backlight, or because they aren't calculating battery consumption with backlight on.

"Typically, if you use a reflective TFT display, the light of day makes a backlight unnecessary out of doors," said one designer who works on pocket machines, "and in that case, the battery life can be very good. But I'd be amazed if it's better than the monochrome screen."

"It's not known whether the Treo 270 will support GPRS," says Goodwins. "It uses a Wavecom WISMO Pac GSM/GPRS module that is capable of GPRS, but the test reports on the FCC Web site only cover GSM calls. The same cellphone unit is used on the 180, which does not support GPRS, but enabling it would be a matter of a software upgrade and could conceivably be introduced after product launch."