Edited for various reasons
So far, a friend at Palm’s customer care department has done a good job trying to find out where I get my info – unfortunately, he just became a very valuable source of information for me without knowing it. Sounds mad? True – so let’s dive right in.
His horror trip started when he sent me an email about two recently-leaked Motorola devices. Not exactly interesting for a Palm manager – I wondered why he wanted to know where the images came from. He repeatedly asked me if I knew who manufactured these machines…it was Compal, a manufacturer with which Palm has not done any business so far (AFAIK).
All of it made no sense for me until I stumbled across this blog entry from Pocketables – in it, they claim that the device Palm aficionados know as “Roteo” is manufactured by – you guessed it – Compal:
Other enthusiast web sites have already figured out that the keyboard of the “Roteo” (pictures below) is a 1:1 copy of the keyboard layout found on Palm’s Centro and Treo smartphones – while this could be coincidental, the evidence above makes me feel like we are looking at a real Palm whatever device.
Once again: don’t take my word for it. But I am pretty sure that it is true. Why for heavens sake should a (highly decorated) customer care manager working for one company care about losses at another: shouldn’t he be happy if analysts are all over another company and leave his own employer alone?
Weird…
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I can believe it. Palm has shown something of an affinity for curious mechanical bits in their devices before. Despite the device in question being somewhere on the ugly side, It is also kind of cool (especially with the huge screen that practically screams multi-touch).
yeah..this is truly whack! I don’t like this ugly phone anyway..but I can believe the whole thing about other companies using other people’s devices and parts….that is the cut throat world of the marketing gov. Ahh..I’ll just settle for blackberry..thank you
On that last image… is that really a trackpad?
I have my doubts about this device, look at this image http://cfs15.tistory.com/image/31/tistory/2008/12/16/16/50/49475dda8b55e just a lil big for an smartphone…
@Alphasmart it does look like a touchpad, even with two click buttons, they are not the first to include one in a PDA, the ipaq hx4700 had one too and believe me it was just a stupid design, impossible to use, lets see how this turns out tho.
Palm’s new devices aren’t manufactured by Compal AND the above images have already, long before your post, been identified as non-Palm device.
Tackpad looks cool, maybe this way its easy to install mouse base operating systems like linux, windows and mac. Wait this would make a mini notebook