Buzz Bruggeman discusses Treo 600 in Business Week

Burton "Buzz" Bruggeman (see magazine photo below)-- real estate attorney, head of Active Words, Weblogger and gadget-man-about-town -- is featured in Business Week's November 10, 2003 article about handheld devices.

The article leads with Buzz's enthusiastic reaction to the Handspring (palmOne) Treo 600. As he visits a property in Orlando he speaks to a client on the Treo 600 and he snaps a photo that he sends to the client.

"So what's the big deal?" Business Week writer and columnist Stephen H. Wildstrom asks. Answering his own question, Wildstrom says, "Lots of wireless phones have cameras these days.

"But how many also have a keyboard for typing e-mail, access to e-mail accounts, a Web browser, a player that handles not only music but also recorded books from Audible.com, contact and calendar data, and the ability to run hundreds of Palm programs?"

Blown away

Buzz says he was "blown away by its ability." Buzz helped test the Treo 600 before it was released to the public on October 15. "It comes as close as I have seen to being a truly pervasive computing device. The size is right and it does everything," he says.

I haven't played with the Treo 600, but I have an Hitachi G1000 Pocket PC that includes a swivel camera, a keyboard and can run Microsoft Pocket PC programs. It has a bigger screen than the 600 but it's also significantly more cumbersome.

For me, the G1000 is great for reading eBooks, surfing the Web via Sprint PCS' 1xRTT network (though not always fast enough) and sending e-mail (because of the keyboard)h.

What price power?

But the G1000 is expensive, huge and heavy. (I've written about it a bit in my other wireless data Weblog in August and September. It weighs 8.4 ounces and is longer than the typical PDA because of the keyboard.

The G1000 (photo left) weighs 8.4 ounces compared to the 600's 6.2 ounces and the G1000 costs $650 compared to the 600's $600, both from Sprint PCS. I've always thought the G1000 would be a niche device. But the 600 could be much, much more popular -- but only once the price decreases by several hundred dollars.

I haven't extensively tested the 600 so I can't provide a detailed analysis. I can say, however, that the best keyboard on a handheld device is on the Research in Motion BlackBerrys (BlackBerries?). The BlackBerry PIM functionality and design, however, are from the Era of DOS.

Camera phone applications

The Business Week article doesn't highlight the applications for camera phones. The brief write-up about Buzz illustrates an important application for a vertical market segment: Real estate.

Buzz is a real estate attorney and the abilty to quickly snap and transmit a photo of a piece of property can be tremendously valuable. Indeed, some real estate agents already are using camera phones to send photos of hot properties to clients.

This will be a very useful application and I can see how moblogs designed for real estate companies could be quite useful.

Camera phones have lots of "sizzle" for the media. But there is a lot of "steak" in the applications, and there are many more meaty applications to come.

Comments

[david stelter]

hey how can i sign up for the Nokia's blogger program you mentioned

[randy]

Visit www.fotoamigo.com !

I thought you might want to hear about this new photosharing site- You can do mobile phone uploads to there for free. i do it all the time