Windows Phone Thoughts: NYT on 10 Greatest Gadget Ideas of '05, Including the Treo 700w's Voicemail

"...some of the year's greatest joys weren't new products, but aspects of new products. Here and there, you could find tiny touches of brilliance:...Voice mail is a delightful invention. But trying to remember which keys to press - for replay, skip, delete and so on - is not so delightful, especially if you have more than one voice mail system to learn. Thanks to Palm, then, for adding VCR-style buttons on the touch screen of its coming Treo 700W cellphone. You just tap Skip, Play, Delete, or whatever. The phone remembers which touch tones to play so you don't have to."



David Pogue, technology columnist for the New York Times, has penned a great little end-of-year article on some of the neatest "gadget ideas", including Sandisk's USB-enabled SD card, Apple's TV show download model on iTunes, and others. You need a login to read the whole article, but the above mention was particularly interesting from a PPCT perspective, and is one of the reasons why the 700w's release, while unimpressive hardware spec-wise, is impressive from a usability perspective: it really looks like Palm will be the first WM OEM to actually do some innovative things with the WM5 OS. Along with the nifty Today screen shortcuts, this simple yet brilliant idea shows that they're not just "another OEM". Alas, I'm not sure it's enough for me to overcome the 240x240 screen and price, and yet I wouldn't be surprised if the Treo becomes the most usable Pocket PC Phone yet.