“With the Treo Pro, Palm Inc…shows it, too, can innovate.” That’s how a Dow Jones story on Palm’s new smartphone starts off…and it’s a jarring, unfair note on which to begin it. Yes, Palm has seen more than its fair share of woes in recent years, many of them self-inflicted. But this is a company with a rich history of innovation–if you were to list the most important and influential mobile gadgets of all time, both the PalmPilot and the original Treo would rank high. Palm surely wants to prove that it can innovate again, but history is not going to look back at this company as an also-ran.
The Treo Pro, which Palm announced today after a couple of false starts, is entirely evolutionary. Pace Dow Jones, but I’m not sure if there’s anything truly innovative at all about it–what it is is a much-needed and overdue refresh of the basic Treo design, which had changed amazingly little since the release of the Treo 600 back in 2003. But a phone doesn’t have to be particularly innovative to be sexy, and the Treo Pro is the first Treo since the 650 that can reasonably be described as sexy…
