Brighthand to palmOne: build a low-cost Treo

Over at Brighthand, our pal Ed Hardy has some advice for palmOne: get off your asses and get a low-cost Treo smartphone as soon as possible (he may not have been that graphic). Not everyone wants to spend $500 on their cellphone or needs something as fully-featured, and he proposes they create a "Treo 500" — a smaller, more budget-conscious smartphone that trims away some of the extras from the Treo 600, like a keypad or keyboard and an SD memory card slot,
and would only be 3 inches high, 2.4 inches wide, and less than an inch thick (the Treo 600 is an inch and a half longer). In fact, there has been some noise out of palmOne over the past few months that they do have plans for a whole range of different Treos, including a more entry-level model, though there's been nothing concrete about when one might surface. We just hope they get more creative with the design than that mock-up of a Treo 500 that Brighthand posted up.