Palm Treo
The smartphone before the smartphone: a full thumb keyboard, a stylus, Palm OS, and the then-startling ability to check your calendar in the middle of a call. Built by the PalmPilot's own inventors after they walked out on Palm.
The Treo came from Handspring, the company Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan founded in June 1998 after they grew unhappy with the direction of Palm under its new owner, 3Com — the same three people had invented the PalmPilot. Handspring's Visor handhelds carried it to a June 2000 IPO whose shares rose 35 percent on the first day, but in early 2002 the company dropped the Visor for a line it called "communication-centric": the Treo. The first models, the Treo 180 and 180g of February 2002, were monochrome GSM flip phones, one with a thumb keyboard and one with a Graffiti writing area; the Treo 90 that April was the only Treo without a phone in it.
The one people remember is the Treo 600, released in late 2003: a candy-bar shape people compared to a bar of soap, a full QWERTY keyboard under a 160×160 color touchscreen, a five-way navigator, an SD slot and a VGA camera on most models. You could look at the calendar while talking, dial straight from the contacts list and send email — ordinary now, remarkable then. It was also the first Treo to carry the Palm name: Handspring merged back into Palm's hardware division that year, and the 600 was rebranded the palmOne Treo 600. Its GSM version was one of the few quad-band phones then sold in the United States. The Treo 650, unveiled in October 2004, added a sharper 320×320 screen, Bluetooth and a removable battery.
A long line of Treos followed. Through the 680 they ran Palm OS; from the 700 series in 2006 Palm also sold Windows Mobile versions, starting with the 700w, and the 680 was the first Palm OS Treo without the stubby external antenna. The cheaper Palm Centro of October 2007 carried a Treo-family part number without the name. The Treo Pro of 2008 was the last, and in June 2009 the Palm Pre replaced the line — two years after the iPhone, which went on sale as an AT&T exclusive in June 2007, had changed what the word smartphone meant.
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