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October 21, 2005
Treo 650: A Status Report
I've lived with my Treo for about two weeks.
It's far from the best phone I've ever had.
I explained it to a colleague today like this - it needs to reboot far more often than a phone should, but less often than your average windows box. (Speaking of Windows, Dawnise's notebook has this really annoying habit of not coming back from resume. Factory Windows install, no funky drivers or applications, just a flakey as a bowl of breakfast cereal. If anyone has the magic incantation to fix it; aside from "install linux"; I'm all ears.)
I bought a 1GB SD card for it at Costco last weekend - so my phone now has more storage than my first several computers...
I'm still searching for the killer email app. I've tried the built-in VersaMail, which isn't bad, but isn't going to win any prizes (ignore the prize on that page, it clearly didn't deserve it). I tried (at the continued raving of a friend) ChatterMail - which wouldn't even reliably connect to my work IMAP server and had a UI only a mother could love, and finally I had work buy me a copy of SnapperMail - which is good, but lacks the ability to apply filters to the messages it synchronizes. (I get a lot of email from our bug tracking system - and it would be nice not to have to sync it to my phone...)
I'm running an eval of PocketTunes - a 3rd party app that will not only play tracks purchased from a variety of online music stores, but will also act as a portable subscription device for Rhapsody. Not sure I'll buy it when the eval lapses, we'll see.
I'm also running an eval of VeriChat - which seems functional enough (I'd like it more if it had Jabber support) but I'm not sure about an annual subscription to IM from my phone. It has come in handy a couple times since I installed it, but I'm a cheap bastard at heart...
Probably the highest geek factor goes to pssh and TuSSH. Standing in Seattle Center, googling for "ssh client palm", finding and downloading pssh, running it, logging into my home machine and getting the directions to a friends place is pretty high on the "cool tech" scale.
Oh, and I installed a Java Virtual Machine. Not 'cause I have anything to do with it, just 'cause I could...
As for the reason I bought it - I managed to get it sync'ing with the calendar server at work (we use some abomination made by Oracle) - and it has helped me keep my day straight -- mostly be telling me when the meeting I'm in is making me late for the meeting I'm supposed to be in.
I've started taking notes about books I want to read, movies I want to watch, and all manor of similar stuff that I formerly put on a mental list and promptly forgot.
So I guess it's working...
Posted by dberger at October 21, 2005 8:48 PM