Windows Phone Thoughts: APRIL FOOLS: Palm Announces Treo 700d, Features MS-DOS 6.22 and Legendary Simplicity

I've just received an exclusive report, apparently from Palm's executive team. It appears they're poised to roll out another Treo right after the 700p (PalmOS) release, and it's something from left field, but very likely to shake up the handheld industry overnight. I'm very proud to present to you a prototype picture of the new Palm Treo 700d!



As the screenshot and the name implies, this Treo is no slouch: it's running the latest independent release of MS-DOS, v6.22. This immediately makes this new Treo compatible with more software than most of the handhelds on the market. Apparently, the 60MB flash ROM appears as a hard disk to DOS. A floppy drive can be plugged into the USB interface at the bottom of the device; flash media up to 2GB can also be mounted, as long as it uses FAT16.

The press copy in the leaked report suggests that HP's old DOS-based handhelds is the inspiration for the 700d. It reads, "The huge success of the HP LX series handhelds inspired us to bring that technology to the consumer who demands full compatibility with legacy applications such as Lotus 123 v2.2 with integrated Allways, WordPerfect 6.0, and more. Since the Treo has a full QWERTY keyboard, DOS use is intuitive and really brings home the simplicity of Palm that consumers demand."

The hardware is visibly similar to the current 700w (and the rumored 700p), but features some new under-the-hood specs apart from the ones listed above.

• An Intel i386SX processor running at 16MHz;
  
• 640KB of RAM, expandable to 1MB (the extra 384KB is available as either EMS or XMS);
  
• The screen is 320x320, but natively supports the CGA/MCGA/EGA/VGA 320x240 standards and will downsample higher resolutions, including 640x200, 640x350, and even 640x480;
  
• Borland's SideKick 1.5 is bundled and is resident in memory to serve phone functions. It features a full NotePad, Calculator, Calendar, and Dialer; the latter is enhanced to integrate natively with the phone module in the device. If more memory is required to run memory-intensive applications, EMM386 or a similar memory manager can be used to load SideKick into high memory.

I don't know about you, but I'm really excited about this. I can't wait to load the huge amount of DOS software I have into a handheld device. Rumors also abound that Windows 3.0 or 3.1 might work on the 700d -- if I get my hands on one, I'll be sure to try it out and report back. Anyone plan on getting one? :D