Treo650 observations

[Ronnie Acuna]

There has been discussion on this forum, from time to time, of moving to a Treo650. I have posted the following at the Treo forum (which is pretty quiet compared to this one!) which might be of interest....

I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that purchasing the Treo650 is one of the greatest wastes of money I have yet inflicted on myself.

In the couple of weeks I have had it I have been obliged to reinstall the desktop software and perform hard resets on 9 different occasions. The number of soft resets exceeds that ? I stopped counting. Those were the soft resets I performed intentionally, not the ones that the machine decided randomly to introduce.

Just about every aspect of the phone and PDA features has given problems of one form or another.

Try looking up Treo650 support on the Asia site of palmone ? and you can?t find it. Oops, sorry, they say, actually we DO support the 650 but haven?t got around to updating our website yet. There?s a confidence builder. However, despite the nature of the problems differing, the ?solution? is always the same ? try a soft reset and if that doesn?t work try a hard reset and/or reinstall the desktop.

Now the latest. Versamail, which comes as standard, does not support email user names which contain the symbol @ - which is required by my host. Oh, and the number of characters spaces available is too few, anyway. So, one of my major reasons for buying the Treo650 ? easily accessing email without carrying more than one device ? is also eliminated.

Yes, I can change my host and yes I can try another program ? but why should I have to? This product is supposed to be ready to go almost out of the box. If experience is anything by which to judge, a third party application will only cause yet more problems.

To add insult to injury, Realplayer, Versamail and other odds and ends cannot be deleted to make space. At least with the T3 one can use Brayder Technology?s products to do so ? not for the Treo650.

And the time as displayed changes by some five minutes a day ? an issue which palmone simply ignores when asked.

I?ll give the device, and palmone, another 14 days before it gets junked. In the meantime, if anyone?s considering converting to the Treo650 ? think very, very carefully.

Ryetee

PS The display is nice

 

[Academy& Clockworthy]

The Treo 600 ran Eudoramail quite happily, so I assume the 650 should as well. IMHO, Eudoramail is much better than Versamail - it supports muliple accounts and IDs, but puts them all in one inbox, which suits my style of working. It's a free download from Eudora, as I recall.

Yes, decent email out of the box would be nice, but the T3 suffers there just as much as the Treo 650 does!

 

[Kunmui]

Out of the box without any additional software, I doubt that the 650 is going to cause much problem.

I'm wondering why you had to reinstall the desktop software....that's not an issue of the Palm so much as an issue with Windows?

The problem with being an early adopter of hardware is the potential for conflict with existing software. When Windows XP came out it had problems with older none 32bit software and it still does. Nearly every software manufacturer had to update their product in order to work with the new Kernel file.

This is exactly the same as with the 650 or the T5 which uses a totally different NVFS system compared to the old volatile memory.

If the 650 does not work "out of the box" with it's on board software then I think your point is valid but since your not specifiying which additional software you have then I suspect that the cause is there.

I look at it this way - I can use any cellular phone without much issue but I can't add software to it that does the other things that the PalmOS platform is capable of.

The 650 is still a piece of hardware that has not yet received software updates from the various 22,000 Palm Programs out there - I believe only a few have updated their software to match the hardware.

I think you'd be better off blaming the software developers then you would the hardware manufacturer because the 650 "out of the box" probably works pretty good until something "foreign" was added to it.