Bought the Treo 650 because…
1) my current flip phone was crap-
the flip part has been broken off for the past couple years
(I made do with a headset)
and (more importantly) the battery life was down to 15 minutes
(with no spare batteries apparently available anymore); and
2) I was taking the girls camping and Mom insisted I have a “working phone”.Hate to do things halfway, so… TREO TIME! (read on…)
Honestly, I thought it was going to be a compromise, as I was spoiled by having Linux in my pocket with my Zaurus (until I walked into the long edge of a door with it). I was wrong, the Palm OS is alive and well and usably fast, and the Treo is a great blend of converged features.
Phone – the reason the Treo rocks, it’s primarily a phone;
Camera + camcorder (low quality but good enough to be fun);
Always-on internet access for $15/mo (~modem speed);
That means the web via Blazer, the Palm browser;
and also email via Chatter, a nice IMAP package;
and also SSH, through pssh;
Totally expandable storage via an SD slot;
MP3’s;
Play just about ANY movie format through the AWESOME TCPMP app;
The great Palm PIM software;
Doc-To-Go for Word/Excel/etc.
Any other great Palm software.
Now for the Bluetooth downer…
I am not into tech gadgets that waste my time – computers waste enough of it as it is. But I’ve loved the idea of wearable computers for as long as MIT’s lab has been around and William Gibson wrote about putting a retina gun in a pair of glasses. So the latest round of Bluetooth smartphone hype (set up your own Personal Area Network (PAN) today!(tm)) hooked me. I picked up a no-name USB Bluetooth adapter for cheap at CompUSA, plugged it in, and expected it to work. HA! Problems:
Windows support for Bluetooth is crap – they leave it up to the product vendor;
So I was relying on “AmbiCom” for my Bluetooth stack, drivers, servers, all kinds of stuff – not terribly bad in itself so far;
On the other side of the connection, you need a whole separate stack, drivers, servers, etc.
The Treo comes with some stuff, but I had to add some other stuff;
You have to “pair up” the devices with a common password;
There are a few steps involved in that, and you’ll often find the goofy thing powering down in the middle;
The Bluetooth specification sucks when it comes to specific device support;
Synching is a specifically difficult challenge as it’s obviously very device-specific;
My PC-side Bluetooth software has a generic “sync” interface that simply doesn’t work for me;
To get the Treo-specific sync to work you have to set up a “virtual port” on the PC;
This was a real bitch, there are about 17 diff steps to get it hooked up;
The most difficult snag: click the BT tray icon while attempting the sync, there was a hidden “allow connection?” prompt;
And now that you’ve arrived at BT nirvana, you realize it is…
1) not automatic – you have to turn it on every time you want to use it;
2) slow as a dog (< 40kbps); and
3) a battery killer… sigh…
So unless you really want to geek out I’d skip the Bluetooth for now (as of Palm OS 5 w/ BT 1.1)…
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