I just read Russ’ rant on the Treo line and PalmOne and figured I’d add my specific comments about the Treo line, since my wife just purchased a 600 on Sunday.

The driving factor behind my wife’s purchase of the device was the large catalog of medical software available for Palms and the ubiquity of the devices in her hospital. She’s a medical student, and has seen the use of PDAs (mostly Palm) become pervasive enough for her to feel like she’s missing the boat if she doesn’t have one. She also wanted to be able to deal with her email and do some IM on breaks during her longer rotations.

I’m not going to get into a full review of the unit. That’s been done way too many times on other sites. But I will get into a couple major thoughts I had:

The Treo 600, like all Palms, cannot multitask. Two programs cannot have access to the network connectoon at the same time. Therefore, email can’t be downloaded when browsing the web, your IM session gets terminated when you switch out of it (though VeriChat tries its best to be slick about dealing with that), and various other network usage annoyances happen that make the power-user grumble.

As far as data apps go, The Treo 600 is a Palm with a phone attached. Integration is barely the word for this. Basically, it feels the same as the experience with a bluetooth palm – only with faster connection times since the bluetooth connection step is removed. Each app needs to explicitly grab the network handle and/or connect. It’s really clunky compared to my sidekick – which keeps multitasking network access open all the time for all applications on the device.

Those were my major gripes with the device (well, along with the relatively weak EMail program it ships with). Again, the advantage Palm and the Treos have is the huge back catalog of software available, and the support of a dedicated user base. The medical profession is part of that user base.

For enterprise email and scheduling, the Blackberry beats it hands down. I’ve owned one of these and can attest to how seamless and rock solid it is.

For a device to integrate data into an average person’s life, many devices come closer than the Treo. My Sidekick does very well – and phones with smaller form factors are starting to come close too, such as the LG F9100. Sure these phones can’t be considered true smartphones. But as far as enabling persistent access to EMail, IM and web in a way that a casual user would be willing to accept into their life, they are moving along the right track – much more so than the Treos.

So I agree with Russ. Aside from specific markets like medicine, where does this leave Palm?