Of course every Treo fan knows about the 600 by now, but if you don't, get on over to HandSpring.com now and scope it out!
Around July 1, 2002 I took possession of a Treo 180 Communicator, a combined PalmOS Device ("Palm Pilot") and GSM Cell Phone. Treo models 180, 180g and 270 are the same basic unit: the 180g has standard Palm hand printing (stylus or fingertip) input instead of a keyboard and the 270 has a keyboard and a color screen). The 300 is a 270 that talks CDMA (Sprint) instead of GSM. The low-end Treo 90 is a Treo in name and form only - it has no phone, and is a PalmOS Device only.
The Treo 180 which I have is a Very Kool Device [for 2002] (pictures lost when HandSpring.com was shut down). If Handspring would give me a Treo 270 in exchange for my 180, I would happily tell you about the great color screen :-)
Still to come (among others):
This time the telephone half of the device went dead. Powering it up left the message "Looking for service", but the flipping (animated) logo that normally accompanies this was not present. And, it would wait for hours looking for service in areas that I knew had service (I live near a tower, hey).
This time, however, Handspring's Customer Service team got it right the first time. They told me to download a special version of the "Radio Reset" application ("_RadioReset.prc"), and I was literally back on the air in about five or ten minutes. Good work Customer Service (but bad engineering to require such a kludge on handhelds out in the field).
A fix for the "opening lid jumps to phone application" feature/problem is available by installing the TreoButton application. Good stuff!
Handspring comes through again! They now offer all registered owners a free download of RecoEcho, which implements Grafiti handwriting recognition for the keyboard-based Treo models (all but the 180G). It works pretty much like the original. Thanks, Handspring!
Well, after a looong series of goof-ups, their head office gave up on their service department and sent me a replacement Treo 180 (After all the delays, I was hoping for a free upgrade to color, but no).
I'm happy to report that the new one (their third try) works fine!
Continuing price drop: Handspring now offers it for $99 with T-mobile activation. T-mobile is a European operation and they must really want to get in to the US market to be willing to subsidize the phone purchases by about US$200 each... Bear in mind it requires two-year activation.
They are in fact sending a replacement. Will it be "third time lucky", or "three strikes and you're out"?
Treos are now down to C$549 with activation in Canada, and are selling for US$350 with activation on Handspring's web site. Rumor has it that sales have been below expectation. Buy more Treos, folks!
My Treo became victim of the "broken speaker wire" problem, which is apparently better known than I knew :-) Handspring replaced it. But the replacement suffers from really bad reception; it looks as though they may have to replace it again. In the process, I found out that there's a Treo Failure Survey thread in the TreoCentral Discussion Forum [no longer available].
I have an obscure email alias on my server that relays to the SMS gateway and from there to my phone. You know, you send mail to 1234567890@pcs.yourcarrier.com and it appears as a Short Message (aka Text Message) on your phone. When I was away from the internet it occurred to me that I could "ping" my server by sending an email to this alias from the phone; if the server is up, the mail would get forwarded back to the carrier's SMS gateway and back to my phone. In effect, the "ping" command.
So of course I tried it. Sure enough, it came through, about a minute or two later. Slow ping, but ping nontheless.
You know the stories about the great ideas you think about just as you're falling asleep. I've long kept my Palm device on my night table, so I could jot them down before falling asleep and forgetting them until it's too late. With Grafiti I could actually print in the dark, using the device's backlighting to ensure I was writing something close to what I meant to say, without turning on a bright light and awakening my spouse.
With the Treo 180 keyboard, you can't do this! The keys are fairly small, and I can't get a sense of what row I'm on. I guess that's why the 270 has a backlit keyboard. And I also know why Handspring will never have a trade-in program for loyal 180 owners... Sad but true, and remember you read it here first. If they do I'll eat my words.
However, there is a solution! An inexpensive program called Jot lets you do handwriting recognition. It has two modes, one that lets you use Grafiti-like gestures - but writing in the main screen while using any app - and another that uses more conventional handprinting gestures. I'm glad to have handwriting recognition back, for times when you can't or don't want to use the keyboard.
This is strange - I rebuilt the pilot-link application again, and this time malsync (the UNIX AvantGo client) works FINE, and JPilot's Synch function works over USB - almost. JPilot installed various apps and pdb's, then synch'd Date, Address, and ToDo before dying on Memo. It failed at the same spot every time. I went into JPilot and saw which record was the last one on the UNIX desktop view, and saw that the next record was a fairly long memo. Split it into two shorter ones, and now it repeatably gets MemoPad synched OK and dies in "Saved Preferences". Now I know the problem. The older Pilot-Link that JPilot was using has a limit of 1024 on buffer size that it can handle reliably. This is fixed in 0.11.1 of PilotLink, so once I get it upgraded, I should be fine.
As I mentioned earlier, if you synch using Palm Desktop under Windows 2000, it does work over USB. And it did load up everything from my ancient Palm III into the Treo (including the 3.1.1 update which I forgot to remove, but which the Treo seemed to be clever enough to ignore, since it knows that's for an older PalmOS than it's running, and it still has an Update 3.5.2H installed). But I'm a UNIX geek, so I use JPilot. HandSpring hasn't been very forthcoming about the technical details of the USB synchronization, according to the open source developers.
The serial cable I ordered on July 5 still hasn't come in, and the link to Purolator's tracking site (provided by Handspring's confirmation email) still shows "no package in system". Oh, the joy of living in a "foreign" country with its own customs & excise!
Yup, I got mail dated July 16, with no explanation of why it took them ten days to get around to shipping it - they didn't say it was on backorder when I placed the order (July 5th).
People sometimes ask me if I can really type on that tiny keyboard? The answer is: Yes! The first large-scale commercial deployment of this style of keyboard was in the RIM Blackberry pager/email handheld. And that's been very successful! In fact, RIM has some patents that may be challenging to Handspring.
Unless you have really large thumbs, the keyboard works fine. You can either type with two thumbs while holding the handheld or, if it's flat, you can almost touch-type (once you learn where all the symbols are). It takes a bit of practice, but I'm already (subjectively) at the speed and accuracy I was at after several years of using Palm's Grafiti.
The only part I found funny was holding the stylus while typing. After using Grafiti so long, part of my brain says I should be using it, but here I am holding it and touch typing. Weird!
Incidentally, speaking of typing, I've never used a plain cell phone for sending SMS (short messages, text message), and I never would spend my time typing text on a 12-key keyboard), but Treo not only lets you type them, but even has a series of template message (which they call "boilerplate"), for things like "I'm running late" with a drop-down chooser for how late you're running (you can tell they tested this stuff on people like consultants that drive to meetings, or spouses/etc. who have to meet for dinners...). I think you can define your own templates, but haven't found out how yet. The 8 or so they give cover the basics; this is Good Stuff.
And yet again speaking of typing, if you find after getting a keyboard-based Treo, you can always get Jot, another handprinting recognition program for PalmOS.
Here's a little glitch I've found with Treo:
The Palm part of the device always starts up in the Phone application.
That is, unlike a traditional Palm device which powers up in the
middle of the app it was running when powered down, Treo
always powers up in the speed-dial screen of the phone app.
This is a bit disconcerting, but you get used to it.
You don't lose data in most apps, but you may have to go through
various menus or screens to get back to where you were.
There may be a way around this "always powers up in Phone" issue,
but I haven't found it yet.
One thing that IS cool about the phone app is that you can single-click (with the stylus or, if you've got a screen protector, using your fingernail gently) on anything that looks like a phone number, and the app will ask if you want to dial it and, if you click OK, go ahead, even powering up the phone half of the device if necessary.
And one more shortcut: you can type a person's initials (one char from the firstname plus as many chars as the lastname as needed to disambiguate), and it'll look up. So if I type "ida" int the contact screen, it jumps to my entry. This was not in PalmOS3, so I can't tell if it's a PalmOS 3.5 feature or a Treo addition, but it's a real timesaver!
Once a call is established, you can switch to speakerphone mode (not loud enough for a large conference room), hang up, conference, or hold the call, just by touching on of the large buttons on the call-in-progress screen.
In fact, since the phone app isn't required to keep a call going, you can switch to the contact screen - or even another app such as your scheduler, and type into it while talking on the phone.
The only real techie problem I've had is the USB sync on the Treo, and only because I'm not using either of the two supported operating systems, but OpenBSD (OpenBSD rocks! and is the secure, freely-available UNIX implementation used on almost all my computers). The patch provided to Pilot Link lets MalSync (the UNIX AvantGo client) connect, but it does not actually download any pages. And the patch doesn't work at all with JPilot. I've ordered the Serial cable from Handspring to see if this fixes it.
One thing I really like is the weight; the Treo 180 including built-in rechargeable battery, built-in antenna, and SIM card is about 5 1/4 ounces, slightly less than my older Palm III which only had 2 MB of RAM, and no built-in cell phone(!).
How do you find a case for this thing? Handspring's accessories page? HandAndGo.com? Sure, but not for me. Ever the tweaker, I took my old Palm case, and punched holes for the antenna, the phone service LED, and the earpiece. Works great.
I finally swapped my Palm III for a Treo 180, my fifth PalmOS device and the first I've had with a keyboard. I'm really happy with it so far. First, the complete list of Palm Devices:
I bought this Treo on eBay based on an assurance that it would work with any GSM cellular carrier. For those that don't know, there are three major modes of digitally encoding voice/data onto radio waves for use in cell phones:
The Qualcomm/Kyocera Smartphone uses CDMA, and the Treo uses GSM. The [CT]DMA phones have an identifier called the ESN, electronic serial number, that is baked into the phone. GSM cards use a SIM (subscriber information module), actually the core punched out from a credit-card-sized standard Smart Card. So, with GSM, it's easy to use the same phone with different carriers: you just slide in a new SIM card. People who do time on both sides of the ocean(s) often have two or three SIMs, one per continent, to avoid the often-exorbitant "roaming charges" that some carriers charge. OTOH, if your phone is stolen, kiss it goodbye, because the thief's fence-ring will just remove the SIM (after making a few expensive calls at your expense) and sell your phone "as good as new" with a new SIM card, or even without.
Sim cards are easy to get. Look on eBay. Be sure you get one for your carrier; the carrier's info is baked into the SIM, leaving some RAM still available for storing messages on (Treo doesn't really use this, but lets you store/retrieve messages) and applications (Treo supports this via its "Sim Services" app). See also inTouch who sell a SwissCom mobile SIM and roadpost who sell phones but their "service" is a SIM that you can buy without one of their phones.
At least it's easy to switch unless the phone is "locked" to a given carrier which, fortunately, mine wasn't. The seller wrote:
> I bought it directly from Handspring. I sold it because I wanted the Color > model which I bought directly from Handspring.
That explains it -- since VoiceStream never got their hands on it, they didn't get around to putting the locking codes in. I'd've thought Treo would do it for them (at the factory), but I guess not. This is good news for people who hate carrier-locked phones! And, it tells you where you should buy your Treo.
Carrier-locking, of course, is nothing new, and is not limited to GSM phones (where they lock to the network code in the SIM, meaning you can use a friend's SIM from the same carrier, but not one of the roaming SIMs above). CDMA/TDMA phones are often locked by the carrier so that other carriers cannot change the network id ("SID") in the phone.
Oh, the trouble with Treos? Not much, really. But it is a catchy title :-) At least not much trouble, other than the price. In C$, it sells today for C$999 without activation, C$750 with. The competing Qualcomm CDMA SmartPhone(tm) is C$499 without, C$350-400 with. US prices are comparable (divide by about 1.5). Not a problem if you can grab one off eBay, but the demand there exceeds supply.
And the phone app. It's a bit short on integration: you have to copy and paste to move a phone number from the History List into your Contact Book. This will probably get fixed.
One other annoyance: GSM phones don't learn the time from their local tower, the way CDMA phones (like the Qualcomm/Kyocera smartphones) do. But at least my local carrier lets you call *TIME anywhere on their network and it's a free call.
Not very much trouble. I'm keeping the Treo.
See also [the-gadgeteer.com treo review, no longer available], as well as some reviews on the official Handspring site [ditto].