Smartphone -> Treo 650
I tried the “Treo 650″:http://www.palmone.com/treo back when it was only available on Sprint. I liked the phone, but coverage at home was lousy and Microsoft hadn’t deployed a patch for Exchange server to allow it work with the newest ActiveSync (so I could get my corporate email on the phone).
I returned it and got a “Windows Smartphone”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00068577C/ instead. “Steve”:http://spaces.msn.com/members/steverider/ had me convinced: I’d have no trouble learning to be proficient at T9 text entry, I could write my own apps in C#, I’d have superiour access to the corporate Exchange server, and so forth. Plus, this is the phone that everyone (and I mean everyone) has at Microsoft.
Just after getting the smartphone, I went out to lunch with “Andrej”:http://andrej.mobileduo.com/, who had just sprung for the Treo 650 himself (having none of my situational objections). He was pretty excited about it, and that was my first moment of remorse about my decision.
You see, the thing is, I don’t have time to write apps in C#, and though Japanese people use T9 phones because you can type with one hand (the other is holding on to something on the train, I’m told), I was never quite as fast as I had been using Graffiti on my old Palm Vx. Plus, the promised Exchange connectivity was a little overpromised and under-delivered (though they’re now in beta with a firmware upgrade to fix it, supposedly).
At the end of the day, though, the thing that made me switch was all about UI. I’m tech-savvy, so it’s not that kind of ease-of-use problem. Really, the trouble is that it took too many keypresses to get to my tasks. I had to hit the home button, then the start menu, then the number 1. Yes, I could shorten it to home followed by holding down some number for a second and a half, but that takes just as much time. I bought the “oxios to do list”:http://www.oxios.com but it just wasn’t convenient enough. Want to change the priority of a task? Hit the action button, then the edit button, then hit down 6 times, right, then up or down to choose the new priority, then done and done again. Ick!
So, I called up Cingular and got my Microsoft discount for the Treo 650. I’ve got 30 days to play with it and decide whether to keep it.
Sadly, it’s not a perfect machine, either:
- It has reset itself four times in three days so far. The only software patch available seems to have to do with voicemail, so I don’t expect it to help me.
- There’s a new filesystem that is 30% less space-efficient than the older models.
- The blazer web browser, while far better than the smartphone browser, has dumb little things like bookmarks you can’t delete and it won’t let you scroll down until the page is loaded.
- And the first several menu items in the phone app are fixed (unmovable and undeletable).
I hope there are some enterprising folks out there who have already solved some of these problems and it’s just a matter of figuring out what to type into google.
Overall, though, I *can* get to my tasks a lot easier, so I probably will make the best of it. I use it more as an organizer than a phone, so I’ve just got to have a combined device.
You might wonder why I abandoned my Kyocera 7135 on Verizon. Verizon has no coverage at all inside the Microsoft RedWest buildings. For whatever reason, only Cingular and Sprint seem to work there.