News

"Our future is in wireless" - Handspring VP reveals, as the Treo PDA-phone ships to the corporate buyer

First shipments of the Handspring Treo - combined palm computer and cellphone - are reaching corporate application developers, and network operators; but end-users will have to wait till next month.

Handspring may have grown out of Palm Computing; but it sees its future in the corporate wireless environment, taking lessons from both RIM's Blackberry, and Microsoft's Pocket PC, according to marketing boss Ed Colligan.

The Blackberry has shown Handspring the importance of cosying up to the phone companies, after the example set by Nokia. The PDA supplier is now negotiating with people like Vodafone and Orange, selling Treo as a unique product which is not just a nicer mobile phone than many, but also a better PDA than most.

And there is a promise that "multimedia" will feature in a future design; while the "Soho" code-named email version of Treo is close to announcement.

Colligan refused to pull back from the danger that company founder Jeff Hawkins ran into when he sent a notice to financial analysts, warning that the company's future is not forever Visor. He said the Hawkins prediction was "blown out of proportion" - but that it was nonetheless true.

"I mean, the fact is, Apple isn't known today as a supplier of the Apple II, and if it did, nobody would buy them," said Colligan to the Mobile Campaign while on a business trip to Amsterdam.

"We aren't going to stop selling the Visor while there is demand. And we certainly aren't abandoning the idea of selling Springboard modules to add features to Handspring devices," he said. "But we don't expect to do nothing else in future; quite the opposite."

What matters to Handspring today is: "How can we add value to the carriers?" said Colligan. "The carriers are all dreaming about GPRS - mobile data over GSM phones. But I'm saying to them that it won't matter about GPRS, unless the applications are compelling."

What does Colligan think is compelling? "Selling software to the carriers so that they can provide new services, as our hardware gets more network-capable. And we may also sell services ourselves, through the carriers, because increasingly, they are offering micro-billing features for impulse buyer delivery. For example, a holiday photo with a digital camera; you want to send it now! - not wait till you get back to the photography shop. And you'll be prepared to pay for it. I'd pay a quarter for it!"

While Handspring concentrates on wooing the corporate PDA buyers who are currently fascinated with Microsoft-designed Pocket PCs, Colligan predicts that end-users will also be remembered.

"The Soho product, as we've code-named it, will be designed to provide easy email to people buying it as a personal device. It will be easy to set up to Exchange, for the unskilled user, not requiring a systems admin to configure it," said Colligan.