Sunday April 25, 2004

Due to some recent changes in my circumstance, I need to be available for SMS messaging across different carriers as well as by phone. The Treo 600 is chock full o' goodness: PalmOS means that it can run Top Gun SSH, it unites my palm address book with my phone (it's all in there) and the color display is excellent. The built-in web browser, Blazer, is good enough (but um, I'm not posting this blog entry from it); there's no built-in GPS but if you know where you are, you can always pull up a map to get you the rest of the way. The built in camera is, um, adequate. I mean, I wouldn't take the kodak-moment family photos with it, you're keepers warrant a real camera but hey, just to get a quick n' dirty photo, it'll work.

One word of caution I've received is that the wrong combination of 3rd party PalmOS apps can break it pretty badly. The recommendation I have is to get an sd/mmc flash card and a backup utility that will backup a full image of the OS and apps. Sounds reasonable; it'd really suck to crash your phone into a state where you'd lose everything. The other thing that is kinduva a let down is the lack of bluetooth. I'd heard that the Treo 610 with bluetooth would be out by April but obviously it's the 25th; we're still waiting. I would really like to synch this puppy up without a USB dongle but life's just unfair sometimes. Anyway, SprintPCS seems committed to not carrying phones with bluetooth capabilities (bastards), so I'm not gonna hold my breath.

I haven't been this excited by a PDA since I used OmniSky on a Palm V a few years back. In retrospect, that was pretty sucky but the high geek factor made it a lot of fun. I think this Treo gonna be fun and useful on a much more enduring basis. ( Apr 25 2004, 08:11:16 PM PDT ) Permalink