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Jul
26
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I've been putting off buying a Treo for a while but recent circumstances involving a bottle of baby's formula* and my wife's Motorola necessitated me to rethink that. OK, 'necessitated' is the wrong word - what's the English word for 'provided a weak excuse, enforcing an underlying urge' ? You get the picture - I like gadgets; I just need a lame excuse and my wife just needs a phone that works - everyone's happy.
Anway, browsing some of the Treo650 forums, it seems that many of the reported instabilities have been resolved and the price of a Treo650 is now more reasonable so I took the plunge. The most immediate results of taking the plunge is that I now have less stuff to lug around with me. The following picture is the pre-consolidation state - Tungsten C - used mainly for Calendar, Notes, E-Mail land TomTom GPS; cell phone - use for making calls, telling the time and occasionally taking pictures of the kids; i-River MP3 player (512Mb) - use for listening to tunes, ITConverstations and AudioBooks; the most fricking awesome Shure E2c earbuds** (for listening); Motorola Bluetooth headset (making / taking calls). Clearly this doesn't include all the cords, wall warts, adapters and other essential paraphenalia - but the consolidation didn't have much impact on that problem; more's the pity.
The next picture is post consolidation - I find the Teo650 more than adequate for listening to poor quality audio books and 'pod casts' - in fact it is very convenient for listening to AudibleBooks because the Audible player for palm is very neat; though for better quality music I would still use my MP3 player - it's also more suitable for running / biking (being extremely light). The phone / PDA integration is pretty good - and certainly saves me time in managing contacts - it also ensures my numbers are backed up - I think this is probably the first time in 8 years that I know my cell phone numbers are actuaklly backed-up. Everything else on the Treo650 works the same as the Palm Tungsten - I have installed the latest versions of my existing apps - TomTom Navigator, DictionaryToGo, WorldMate. The web browser on the Treo650 (Blazer) seems to be more reliable and feature rich than the original on the Tungsten.
When I initially moved from the Tugsten to the Treo - I simply synched usnig the same profile - this copied over all the apps. and existing data. This was intended to be a time-saver but the versions of the installed apps. caused a fair amount of instability. The Treo650 is pretty fussy about which versions of apps you use and any problems are likely yo manifest theselves in different areas making it tricky to isolate and resolve the issue. After trawling the forums I decided it would be easier to un-install the apps and re-install the new versions. Once I had done that the instability (soft resets) seem to have stopped; in fact I don't think I have experienced a soft reset since.
So what am I missing ? Well I've still to get a Bluetooth GPS (that works with TomTom) and the lack of WiFi is a pain (for Synching and surfing when in range of a WiFi access point). At some point I'm going to try and use the Treo for my Sun email account as well - that will be the acid test - I think with some server-side filtering it should be mangeable. I'll post an update on these in the future. Those details aside - I'm pretty happy - until someone comes out with the next "the one gadget" at which point I'll be looking for another excuse.
* This was the second time my Wife's phone had been completel immersed in liquid - the first time was in water and I manged to quickly disasemble it and dry it- resulting in a mostly working phone.
** I can't speak highly enough of the headphones - they almost double as 'noise cancelling' headphones - if you are unfortunate enough to sit on airplanes a lot and they are the only headphones I've owned that stay in my ears when I run. Oh, and the sound quality will literally blow your socks off.
