Treo 700p: I’m Conflicted
After a week with my Treo 700p, I have learned (again) that things one wish for do not always turn out to be as good as our dreams.
To be fair (how boring!) I am still learning this new device and its hardware and software idiosyncrasies. Here are a few early impressions.
The Treo 700p is a brilliant compromise between what you want in a mobile phone, email appliance, and PDA. But it is a compromise, so it’s not best doing any one thing.
As a phone, the 700p is OK, earning a B+ grade from me. I especially appreciate having my entire contact database in my phone address book.
The speakerphone is reasonably good, although somebody needs to invent decent sounding small speakers. The quality is ok to listen to, but is rough around the edges for my taste. However, the microphone picks my voice up and people at the other end don’t complain. It also has and easy to find and use onscreen button to mute the microphone, a vital touch for conference calls.
As Jim Soriano noted in a comment, Palm has a KILLER feature: a physical switch (on the top) which allows you to SWIFTLY silence the phone ringer. That grace note should be mandated in the Mobile Phone Usability Act of 2006.
People lust after Treos and other Qwerty phones as a way to have email available anywhere, anytime. But when your work email get 150 or more new messages a day, having them all land in your Treo is not a blessing.
I have ideas on how to mange this email flood better using the procmail mail filtering program which can make decisions before a new message lands in my IMAP mail account. Stay tuned, while I see if I can tame this email on a Qwerty phone beast.
I am experimenting with ChatterEmail, one of the two top-rated mail applications for the Treo (SnapperMail being the other). VersaMail is (almost) universally disliked, but it does have a few loyal fans.
ChatterEmail has impressive user support. Marc Blank, the ChatterEmail developer, appears to be a maniac who works 24 by 7..
I’m also trialing the IM+ instant messaging client. I’ll probably keep using it, but it has rough edges. Then again, so do I.
The Treo 700p camera is better than I expected. The quality is not as good as even a cheap point and shoot, but it’s always available, while my Nikon 4300 is seldom within reach. I assume we’ll see much improved camera phone quality in another year or so.
It’s too soon to give a fair evaluation of the Treo 700p battery life. That is deeply interwingled with how one uses email, as only one example. But my early advice is to keep your travel charger within easy reach.
Am I delighted with my Treo 700p? No.
Am I deeply disappointed? No.
Will I keep looking for alternatives? YES.
For example: a co-worker showed me his HP 6515 (soon to be replaced by the 6915). The HP phone makes a different set of compromises as compared with the Treo family. The screen is a LOT bigger, but that results in a wider phone, one that feels less like a phone and more like a PDA. But the 6915’s screen and larger keyboard are sweet.
After all, if you didn’t want email you wouldn’t select a Qwerty phone, right? So why accept a compromise that is a too-small PDA (screen and keyboard) but an awkwardly large mobile phone?
I’ll keep you updated. Anything is possible. For now, I am gritting my teeth and trying to love (well, tolerate…) my Treo 700p.
July 15th, 2006 at 8:28 am
I like the Treo 650, but I don’t really use it for email all that often; I’m at a computer damn near constantly, so why bother? But the keyboard comes in handy for googling stuff, SMSing, and taking down memos on the go, all of which I do quite a bit. I’ve used one of those nifty folding keyboards with it as well, but if I really need to be writing all that much in a day, I’ll probably just bring along a laptop. (Plus I’ve gotten quite good at typing on the phone quickly.)
September 12th, 2006 at 4:54 pm
I also jumped in recently and bought a Treo 700p and I think I might actually be thrilled with it. After three weeks sampling programs and stress testing it, I think I’ve got mine “dialed” to do everything I need it to, which means I get to leave the laptop at home a lot more. (w00t)
The biggest downside I see is that the Palm OS has pretty much reached the end of it’s road, and like the Mac OS 9 to 10 transition (Apple to Unix) Access is on schedule to transition from Palm OS 5.x (Palm) to Access Linux Platform (Linux) which should bring huge improvements to the UI and multitasking. For the time being I found UDMH (Unlimited Dynamic Memory Hack) helps quite a bit to help the phone keep up with all the background processes.
I haven’t committed to Chattermail yet, but it seems to run really smoothly, mark messages properly, and keep syncronized with our servers reliably. Procmail when used with SpamAssassin can be a great combo, but if you have an industrial-strength email account (for a well known company) spam will just always be a part of your life. At least Chattermail lets you delete messages with one keystroke (D) instead of two (Menu-D in Versamail)
So long as this remains stable I think I’m a happy camper for a few years. The only two scenarios I can imagine beting better than this one are “wild speculation” and “oddly unknown”;
Wild Speculation: There are only tidbits here and there on the web but we all know OS X is, like Linux, quite shrinkable. It wouldn’t be that much of an effort for Apple to make a fully-functional mobile version of it. If they really are in talks with RIM a really KILLER product could come out of a partnership.
Oddly Unknown: Though published and easy to find, nobody seems to know that the next Palm OS is Linux and that people have already played with it and are programming for it. This worries and excites me because I think Linux will give Treo users a lot more out of the box than they already get plus lots of stability but damned if there is ZERO buzz or marketing behind it. If Apple enters the game they are going to get killed.