Treo 700p, T+3 weeks
I’m only catching this train two years late, but as my Twitter readers know, I picked up a used Palm Treo 700p about three weeks ago to give myself a smartphone upgrade while keeping my Sprint plan and avoiding a contract extension. Some observations seem appropriate.
- Once you do the maintenance release 1.10 upgrade, the difference between the 700p, 755p and Centro is essentially form factor. The antenna nub on the 700p is slightly aggravating, but the full-sized SD card slot is great (as opposed to miniSD on the 755p and microSD on the Centro) — I can swap cards between camera and Treo to upload photos straight to Flickr on the go.
- As such, there are several applications/upgrades that Sprint/Palm may claim are only available for 755p or Centro, but which work fine on the 700p anyway. The highlights: VersaMail, Google Maps and Facebook. The VersaMail upgrade is an absolute necessity to access GMail via IMAP, which you want to do if you have a home machine running POP due to GMail’s slightly odd handling of POP message availability. Google Maps won’t do aGPS location (because Palm didn’t include those APIs in the OS build, unlike the Centro), but otherwise works fine. Facebook is just fun.
- Blazer is only tolerable as a web/WAP browser, but Opera Mini is darn near unusable. I suspect the primary issue is between Palm OS and the Java VM, but the end result is too aggravating to deal with on a regular basis. I’ll start Opera if I have to reach a particular site that Blazer can’t handle, but that’s it.
- MoTwit is a great little app. I only wish its writer would have coded it to pass the client name with updates, so it could advertise its awesomeness rather than just say updates are “from web.”
- Only notable instance of FAIL: US/Eastern time zone management between Missing Sync and iCal. Mark/space claims it’s an Apple problem, but if they know it’s an Apple problem that only affects their software, they could at least code an internal workaround. And no, editing the time zone manually on each event for my entire calendar (several thousand events dating back close to ten years) is not practical. My personal workaround, creating a DST-less location to match what Missing Sync sends me from iCal/SyncServices and turning off tower-set time zones, breaks World Clock and displays VersaMail timestamps an hour off during DST, but shows me accurate appointments in Calendar, which is the most important part.
Overall report: quality, at the right price, and no nasty contract extension to get in the way of something Android-tastic if/when that becomes ready for prime time. I’ll give it a WIN.
18 July 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: tech