So I’m back in my searches for the perfect smartphone. After almost ten years of being loyal to PalmOS-based devices it’s finally time for a switch. Palm Treo has been one of the most useful electronic devices that I have seen in my life, and I still think that its UI is a stroke of genius. Too bad their latest and greatest is always behind competition. (Palm Pre is still not available in GSM.)

OK - this post is not meant to deliberate on which phone to choose. I’m rather going to talk about what a lot of business people seem to forget about when choosing their mobile device. So back to the basics, here is what I think business users need in their smartphones - and I wish the makers would start thinking more in these terms. Here we go…

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A pretty good synopsis of this year’s hottest smartphone devices:

After years of struggle Palm, forgotten by many, pioneer in the mobile industry, is about to come back. Will they dominate the mobile scene again? Probably not, but it’ll be interesting to watch how much confusion their new product brings to the market.

Palm has been laughed at for the last few years due to their sluggishness. The company that once started the mobile revolution by releasing PDAs in 1996, then rolling out the first widely available smartphones in 2001, at one point stopped innovating, and and gave up most of their market share to the Windows-powered competition.

What’s interesting to mention though is that a few years have passed and Palm OS still has many believers. To me, and I know this may sound funny to some of you reading it in 2008, their old organization sofware is still a viable alternative for business users. Reason? Unmatched usability. No other phone manufacturer has implemented anything that is just as powerful yet simple to use.

So here is why I think Pre can make a difference.

Old Palm OS based Treo smartphones offer Blackberry-like productivity with greater usability. Excellent Calendar & Contacts, threaded SMS messaging, E-mail app with background processes, and brilliant Memo application should mean a lot for an average business user. All these pieces can be easily and quickly operated with just one hand. But… Treos lack hardware features like 3G, GPS and miss even more on the software end: no multitasking, poor multimedia capabilities, archaic web browsing.

On the other hand we have iPhone and I’m sorry to say that (I’m also an iPhone user) but I think it’s just a nice gadget for personal use. Great multimedia though, awesome 3rd party apps, and genius interface for web browsing.

Pre is supposed to have the best of both worlds. While it probably won’t attract lots of iPhone/Apple fans/true believers, it might convert the more pragmatic users no matter what their current PDA/smartphone is. Good luck!

For all Palm OS enthusiasts there is no good news. The company that used to lead the world’s handheld and smartphone markets still cannot find its way of out the trouble. In April 2006, Palm’s CEO officially announced that they would deliver new Linux-based OS platform along with new products by the end of that same year. Almost two more years have gone by and the only news, hardly positive, is that the OS just got the code name..

The earliest estimates for when the new smartphones would ship are, according to Palm Infocenter, February 2009.

It will be interesting to see whether iPhone or other Windows Mobile based devices manage attract those hundreds of thousands, still loyal, Palm OS-based Treo users and make them abandon the outdated platform.

The problems are obviously not only related to the software side. On the outside, the chunky Treos have barely changed over the years. Palm needs new designs, up-to-date hardware modules as well as services that will suit the needs of the business smartphone user’s needs.