Month: July 2005

Thoughts on how my Treo 650 worked for me during the Cambridge trip:

1. First off, as a GSM phone it worked just fine over in the UK. The little Bluetook headphone worked okay, but it does seem to sometimes have problems picking up. Need to study this more. Also need to be sure to turn the phone OFF when putting it into its little pouch, lest it dial up someone without my knowing.

   The integration between the phone and the Contacts list is good, but I am a bit frustrated that it strips out any annotation on the numbers besides O/M/H (Office, Mobile, Home). For example, if a business has two numbers — perhaps the front desk and the direct line for someone — there’s no way to distinguish between them without drilling into the contact. Similarly, if two members of a household have a work phone number, or a cell phone, it’s not immediately visible.

   Minor bobbles (not unique to the Treo) with dialing from overseas. If I dialed a home number without the international prefix I needed, it bombed, of course (since the local cell company, O2 most of the time, handles the actual call). If I manually included the prefix for calling the US — “001” — the Treo recognized the owner of the number I manually dialed after it, which was annoying. A shame I can’t type “001” and then click on a contact and have that number appended to it.

2. Using my calendar has gotten a bit dicier under the Treo. It used to be that I just left the time on my Palm stay back on MST — the relative event times still wrang accurately (i.e., for my 9 a.m. MST phone call it would beep at me at 8 a.m. PST). I had to do some conversions at times, e.g., to set an alarm to wake up, but it was still pretty easy.

   Now, of course, my Palm (as a phone) knows the local time (from the cell network), and converts to it. PalmOS now tracks time zones of some events, but not all; as a result, my calendar became a mish-mosh of things noted as being at a different time MST, and other things that were just presented as being at time X (which was the MST time). Rrg.

   Still no easy resolution to the flight info problem. If you just enter in the times for your flight as you get them on your itinerary, your calendar will be inaccurate, since the times are always given in the local time zone of the departure or arrival. You can do the conversion to a single time zone, but that gets into the time zone problem noted above. Worse, the spiffy little Infotriever widget that our corporate travel agency uses to download the flight info (etc.) to Outlook, thence to my Treo, has the same “local time zone” issue I mentioned above — and if you manually change it, it breaks the updating function.

3. The built-in SMS messaging client on the Treo is just fine, and it ties into the camera well. I ended up with some threaded e-mail chats with Margie (at home and at the office) which was really fun. And if the phone is offline (as on a plane trip) I can still queue something up to go as soon as the phone is turned on.

4. I went ahead and got SnapperMail as the e-mail client, rather than the built-in VersaMail. It has stronger IMAP and folder features, and works just fine — except that my Treo has gotten highly space-constrained, which causes the mail function to get a little flaky and prone to locking up. Still, being able to check (pull) my office mail and my home mail was kind of nice — slow, and clumsy, but nice — whether I was in the airport, in my dorm room, or even sitting at the conference table.

5. Web browsing is slow-slow-slow, but it’s still possible, which beats not having it available at all. Things that rely on ActiveX, and some Java bits, don’t seem to work well. I have gained a new appreciation for “PDA-friendly” blogs, and plan to further enhance my own PDA-friendly version.

6. I had mixed luck with the blogging. On the up side, I was able to do all the photo-blogging. I was also able to, on a couple of occasions, use the web browser to enter in posts.

   On the other hand, I couldn’t get Typekey to work, so I couldn’t make (or reply to) comments. And I didn’t have a simple way to post a blog entry without a photo (at least, when I tried sending a message to airblogging.com without a photo attached, it never showed up). I’m going to be researching that …

7. Having the camera was fun, with the notable exception that it takes pretty poor pictures. But that I now can take pictures anywhere I am, even crappy ones, is very spiffy.

8. Use WorldClock as an alarm, which was nice and handy — except that on at least one night my Treo froze up (as SnapperMail was archiving messages to the card), and, so, my alarm was frozen up. Fortunately I woke up early and checked it.

So, overall, a success. The camera, the browsing, the mail capabilities, all have flaws but are still a significant leap forward for my personal gear. Now I just need to fill in a couple of gaps and figure out how to resolve my main memory limits, and I should be great.