AfterTek

Palm, Inc. and Cingular Wireless have unleashed the first Palm Treo smart device running on Cingular’s 3G/UMTS network. The highly anticipated Treo 750 five-band phone runs Windows Mobile 5.0 with Direct Push Technology and offers Palm’s usability improvements plus business features, including email, security, and web access on the go.

The companies say the Treo 750 combines the Palm experience of a multifunction mobile phone with email, messaging, web browsing, organization software and a robust application portfolio with Cingular’s 3G network. Its compact design features an internal antenna, soft-touch finish, and contoured edges. The Treo 750 also has a full QWERTY keyboard, a 1.3-megapixel camera, a 240×240 touch screen and support for Bluetooth stereo headsets.

The Cingular 8525 seems like a large phone, but it is in a good way. When it is closed, it is almost exactly the same size as a Palm Treo 700p, but it opens to show a large, comfortable QWERTY keyboard, while allowing for a large 2.8-inch screen. HTC, the phone’s original designer, has provided a wealth of navigational buttons, including a five-way button near the screen and a set of arrows on the keyboard, three separate “OK” buttons and a clickwheel on the side.

Laptop computers outsell desktops in stores; because the majority of consumers, the smaller devices serve perfectly well as their main computer. That would have been hard to imagine back in the mid-Eighties, when IBM and Apple first introduced their first laptops, each weighing in at about twelve pounds.

And for long time after that, laptops remained either much less functional or much more expensive than the dominant desktops. But now, twenty years later, the laptop has truly become the “desktop replacement.”