Treo 755p released for Sprint

The new excitement in my life is the announcement of the Treo 755p smartphone from Sprint. Now I'm not a Sprint customer and never have been or in all likelihood ever will be, but what's exciting here is that Sprint and Verizon both use CDMA for their phones, which means they usually wind up with the same hardware sooner or later. The phone is very similar to the 700p, but a little smaller and with an internal antenna. It also uses Mini-SD instead of a regular SD card, which has many people up in arms, but I don't really mind, since I've always been too cheap to buy an SD card for my camera, and take the one out of my Treo whenever I want to take a picture. At least now the camera can have the dignity of its own memory card. The phone also comes in two colors, midnight blue and burgundy. Colors are often different between providers, but I hope Verizon has similarly attractive options.

Although Verizon has not officially announced the phone, a thread on the very good TreoCentral forums contains a report of a completely unofficial claim by a Verizon rep that it's in beta now and is scheduled for release in July. Oh looky-there, my contract is up at the end of June, how convenient.

I was actually planning not to renew and stick with my Treo 650 month-to-month until things with the iPhone shake out, but more and more I think the iPhone is a bad idea for me, given how my phone is my only phone for personal and business use, the iPhone is new and unproven on basic things like battery life, reception and availability of software, and I don't trust AT&T/Cingular's coverage in NYC. On top of that I will be in Massachusetts until the end of August and in no position to judge call quality in NYC for several months. So right now my plan is to get a 755p as soon as it's released, which will be a big improvement over my 650, and I will probably not be tempted to get an iPhone until their second version.

And on a somewhat unrelated note, rumors are flying about the release of new Macbook Pros coming up with LED-backlit screens, probably in June at the Worldwide Developers' Conference (WWDC), which would be June 11. Now that I finally have the money saved up, it looks like it's going to be a very exciting summer for me, after a long two years of not upgrading any of the computer-like devices in my life.