Handspring is still producing traditional handhelds, although their new offerings are based on the Treo phone line. Larry Garfield isn't sure that is such a good idea, however.
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While wireless is all the rage, disconnected data-centric devices are still the bread and butter of many companies. Handspring is reinventing itself as a mobile phone manufacturer, but in the meantime still has a foot in the traditional handheld space. The Treo 90 borrows many of Handspring's phone designs, including the body itself. Unfortunately, not all of them map well into a more traditional market.
The hardware
The Treo 90 measures a small 106 x 71 x 16.5 mm and weighs a light 113 grams. The case is a smooth tan plastic. A small landyard loop on the top left side is flush with the case. Inside the case is a 33 MHz Dragonball processor and 16 MB of RAM. The screen is a standard resolution 160x160 12-bit color Transflective STN display. The refresh rate is good for a low-res color device, and our battery test program, AtomSmash, was quite playable. Except in photo viewing applications, the 12-bit display should be just as visually attractive as a 16-bit display. Brightness was also good.
 | The Treo 90 is the only unconnected Palm OS device with a keyboard.
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The Treo 90 has buttons galore, most of them on the keyboard. The Treo 90, like some of its more connected siblings, does not have a Graffiti area but instead has a built-in thumb board. The hard plastic keys are slightly domed and oblong, slanted from the bottom left to top right. There are three rows of alphabetic keys in a standard QWERTY layout, with a fourth row for the space bar, single left-side shift key, right-side Menu/Home key, and an "et cetera key". There is also a blue unlabeled Function key in the lower left. Backspace is on the second row, far right, where a desktop would have the Enter key, and the Enter key is right below it where a desktop would have the right shift key.
The blue Fn key switches into a shift mode that doubles the functionality of almost all the keys, mostly to various punctuation marks, but also to the 10 numeric characters, which are arranged in a phone-order on the Y, U, and I keys and the letters beneath them. We would prefer two Shift keys for better two-thumb typing, but the shift and Fn keys are "sticky", that is, they do not need to be held down while another key is pressed. The Et cetera key, for lack of a better phrase, is marked with an ellipsis (...) and doubles as the '0' key.
The Graffiti alphabet includes far more characters than could possibly fit on a thumb board, so every key has several characters that it generates. Placing the cursor after any letter and pressing the Et cetera key brings up a list of the characters bound to that key, including the letter but not including the punctuation character. Pressing it again cycles through the list, and pressing the space bar selects that character and uses it to replace the letter in question. Almost any imaginable symbol is available through the Et cetera key, including the Graffiti Shortcut symbol (bound to the 'S' key). It's actually a rather convenient setup, though not as easily apparent as we would like.
The keyboard fails, however, in the general usability department. Specifically, the Home button is the Function-shift of the Menu key. That makes simply returning to the launcher a two-button process, whereas on every other Palm model it is a single-button process. Again, while that may make sense for a phone that also has Palm functions such as the Treo 180 or 270, for a "traditional handheld" like the Treo 90 it seems backwards.
The usual four application buttons sit at the very bottom of the face, and are rather small but nicely dimpled. Two directional buttons, undimpled, sit between them. The buttons are smaller than we'd like, but we had no trouble playing AtomSmash.
The power button is on the top rear of the case, and flush with it, making it a bit hard to use. Pressing and holding the power button does not toggle the backlight, as on most Palm devices, but instead locks the keys the way it would on a cellular phone. Pressing and holding again unlocks them. What use this feature has on a non-phone device with a flip cover, we're not quite sure. Sadly, Handspring left out the jog wheel of its phone-equipped Treo models, as well as an Auxiliary (Back) button.
The Treo 90 uses the standard piezeo-electric speaker, and sports a single Secure Digital card on the top of the device. The stylus, in the standard location, is a metal barrel with plastic tip, and nicely weighted, although rather short. A standard Infrared port is also on the top of the device.
The device uses a rechargeable internal Lithium-Ion battery. While charging, the power button flashes green, and glows green when the device is fully charged and on AC power. In our battery burn-down tests using AtomSmash, the Treo 90 lasted 3 hours 30 minutes before giving a low battery warning, and then shut off after 3 hours, 45 minutes. Recharging took just about one hour.
 | The Treo 90 is a smartphone minus the phone, and it shows
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There is a flip cover built into the device that covers the screen and keyboard, but not the app buttons or directional buttons. Handspring says it is removable, but it's a very tight fit. There is a clear plastic area over the screen so that the screen is visible through the cover, but with no jog wheel or auxiliary button and the keyboard itself covered, it is rather useless.
The Treo 90 ships with a USB cable that serves as both charger and HotSync cable. A button on the connector to the handheld itself starts a HotSync. Sadly, Handspring is using the eternally evil adapter-on-plug design of power cord, so it takes up multiple outlets on our power strip.
The software
The Treo 90 runs Palm OS 4.1 and ships with the usual assortment of PIM applications and utilities. Graffiti is, of course, absent. Rather than the usual Date Book, the device uses the Handspring "Date Book+", based on a stripped down DateBk3, and has the Handspring enhanced calculator as well. The Address Book is also missing in favor of "Contacts", Handspring's phone-optimized version of Address Book. The major difference is that in List View, all known contacts for a given records are shown rather than just one, and there is an option to dial a record from the menu. However, as there is no phone component to the device, there is no way to actually dial, nor are any profiles for cable- or IR-connected phones included.
Handspring has tried to provide decent one-hand navigation on the Treo 90, but did not fare very well. The lack of a jog wheel and the limited two-button directional buttons does not help. The spacebar functions as a Select key for many apps, and the directional buttons will scroll some select boxes, but not all of them. Handspring really missed an opportunity to make a good, one-handed mid-/low-range device.
The CD that ships with the Treo 90 also includes the Handspring Blazer web browser, as well as One-Touch Mail and the Palm SMS application. It also includes a full copy of Blue Nomad's WordSmith, the popular Palm OS word processor. It also includes Chapura Pocket Mirror for Outlook synchronization.
Conclusion
The Treo 90 looks, feels, and behaves like a Palm OS smartphone that has had the phone part removed. The device is not bad or poorly implemented, the screen is one of the better low-end color screens we've seen, and Handspring deserves credit for trying to bring a thumb board option to mainstream, unconnected Palm devices. Rather, it feels like pieces are missing, such as the phone components (and the jog wheel, the removal of which leaves us baffled). The keyboard is, with practice, faster than Graffiti, but the keys are a bit small and the single Shift key makes two-thumb typing difficult. More polish and attention paid to the needs of a disconnected handheld rather than a connected handheld would have made the Treo 90 a serious contender in the mid-range market. As is, we are left wishing that it could be just a bit better thought-out.
- What's positive: Thumb board, decent color screen, dimpled buttons
- What's negative: Designed like a smartphone, minus the phone
Overall: 
Price and availability
The will start selling for TBA () in December 1969.
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