Several months ago, I upgraded my cell phone to a PalmOne Treo 650 on my existing Sprint cell service. It's rather a complex device, so I'm still finding things out about it, and have been grossly negligent of this blog. This change has converged my cell phone and PDA into one device that is a little larger than either of the old ones. I knew that this was the cutting edge of convergence devices, but also that means it will not be ideal in several ways. My old Clié went to my wife to replace her old one that got dropped. A while back, she got an iPod mini, so hopefully that will not suffer the same fate.
The switchover to the Treo was met with a lot of problems. Primarily this was from a lot of my old Palm OS 4 stuff that was not Palm OS 5 compatible at all an others that the Treo just didn't like. When I finally got it all sorted out, my Treo had restarted almost as many times as a PC during a Windows installation. It was not encouraging, but I was committed. I did get a nice deal on it after all. I managed to get the Joe new subscriber price of $350 instead of the many years loyal customer price of $450. I probably wouldn't have gotten it otherwise, and I still doubt I'll get $350 of value from it since I'm not some corporate executive it seems to be targeted at.
First the bad stuff. It's not a great phone. Although it has a keypad, which makes typing messages really great, it has no number keypad. Some of the letter keys double as that and are colored differently to help. In many places, they automatically become numbers instead of letters, and you get used to that, but the problem is that they are small compared to any normal phone. Normally, this is not a problem, since you dial from your address book and speed dials mostly. The on-screen keypad digits are big, but not tactile. It has an annoying lack of user feedback when you press a speed dial (which takes a while to execute) so that you are not sure of you did it or if it didn't register the button. If you press the button again to be sure, that often hangs up the call just as it starts because it really did register, and the new default button becomes "hang up", which your second press now executes. It has a speakerphone, but it's not that great either. The quality was such that I would have to repeat what I said often, and the half-duplex mode of a speakerphone made that very trying. The headset it came with was much better, but it has the dangling wire annoyance, of course. Sprint has still not made the phone usable as a modem via Bluetooth or USB cable. Even my old phone could be a modem over the USB cable. At least I don't need to do that hardly ever at this time.
Early on, I had to get a case for it because it was notably heavier than a normal phone or PDA, so having a smooth body, it was going to be very easy to lose grip of. I slapped some eGrips on it until I found a case. The eGrips are fine as long as the surface is not curved, then they tend to come off. Good cases were not easy to find when I was looking since the Treo 650 was so new. I got one that had the stub on the back for the belt clip since that lets it hang in the clip on my car's dashboard. It covers the screen with a clear part that allows you to touch through it, but you cannot be precise at all. This is fine for most things, but is rather annoying in some apps. However, the compromise is no screen protection other than the stick-on cover or an awkward hard case with cover.
It' also not the best PDA. Since it has a phone capability, that is what you use it for the most, so the familiar Palm hard buttons have been changed to cater to that. You get a phone app button to replace your address book button. This is not bad since you primarily have those contacts (new Outlook-style name) for their phone numbers anyhow. You soon ditch the soft keypad in favor of more speed dials on screen since you don't dial raw digits much anymore. The date book is called "calendar", but it still has a hard button thankfully. The memos button is replaced by the power/end button. You tap this to turn the PDA on and off, and hold it to turn the phone on and off. If you are in a call, it will end the call. The to do button is replaced by the messaging button. That defaults to your text messages app. It is still identified as the "todo" button to some applications, which was the only button I could assign to ClockPop to have my pop-up anywhere clock. That solved another drawback of device convergence: I used my old phone as a watch/clock. The Treo only shows the time in certain places, one of which is not while on a call. ClockPop solves that. Since there is not a traditional Palm silk screen graffiti area, the application and menu touch buttons became hard buttons, but not ones you can change - I do like them better as hard buttons. However, the find and calc touch buttons were lost. Find is gotten with option+left shift, but there is no specific cal button unless you redefine one. The good part is that you can program most of them, and you can even program what "option+the button" opens. So, for me, option+phone=web browser, option+calendar=Salling Clicker, option+messages=memos, and the only other one you can do is a long press of the side button, which is the camera for me. Option+power is always lock keypad and power off. The option key is the "symbol shift" key that gets the symbol characters on the keys, some of which are the numbers. The Palm 5-way navigator button is both handy and frustrating. I never used one on a regular Palm OS 5 device, on which it might be fine, but on the Treo, they changed it to allow you to use the unit with one hand better by having it move the control focus around for what will get "pressed" when you press the center button. This is nice on some places, but terrible in others. The big problem is that the up/down which is the page up and down doesn't work until you give focus to the list, where the old up/down buttons would page the list that was on screen without needing to give it focus. Worse, some lists can't be given focus, so you are pulling out the stylus again. Even with the new Palm OS, a new device and a new e-mail program, I still cannot sync my Mac mail with my Palm.
I have gotten over not using graffiti to enter text with. I was not all that great anyhow. I was pretty good, but would make mistakes, and I am compelled to correct them right away, so it made me slow. I'm better with the keyboard anyhow. It took me a while to realize the equivalent of the menu shortcut stroke was to just press the menu key and you can then just press the leter of the menu shortcut you want without having to pull down the particular menu it is in. The "alt" key also makes entering accents and other odd characters nice. Just type an "e", then press "alt" and the first choice is "é" in a little list. Many other characters are gotten by pressing alt after characters that are similar to the one you want, like "/" then "alt" will offer "%, \, |" etc. The screen is definitely better than my old Sony. The smaller size takes some getting used to, but it is tons brighter. I do miss the Clié's handy feature of the app screen staying showing the last app launched rather than going back to the top every time.
Even though my OS 4 hacks could not be used, many are not needed. I was able to replace the ClockPop hack with the OS 5 version, and the hack to make A5 replace the week view in the calendar was obviated by the calendar having a nifty "today" like main screen that did what I was doing with A5. Other hacks were compensating for te fact that the Clié was high-res but not fully, and another assigned apps to holding down the hard buttons, which was somewhat replaced by the built-in prefs of option+button assignments. Also, a few apps were obsoleted, like the scientific calculator I had was outclassed by the new Palm one, which had quite a few modes. My long frustrated attempts at getting news to read on my PDA with AvantGo and Plucker syncing were replaced with just viewing the Palm pages directly in the web browser, which is much quicker and reliable (as long as the Sprint Vision service isn't having a fit). My favorite game, YahtC, runs great, so I'm happy.
I'll talk about the audio, camera and Bluetooth features in the next posts.
Next entry
, and I'm liking them. The pin cap is my favorite because I can pin the shuffle to the outside of my shirt where it won't get sweaty or swing around. As with any of the three clips, they remove the extra cord mess the lanyard has. The controls are great except for the mode switch on the back. Since that has 3 positions (off, ordered play, shuffle play), the middle one suffers from being hard to select. This is also made more difficult since the slider button is hard to grip. If it were just made with some ribs, it would be better. It's made with an unpolished surface to make it grippier than the rest of the shuffle's polished body, but it often isn't enough. However, since it goes to sleep to manage power, you don't turn it on and off with the switch that much.