Like it or not: the Treo 650
Posted by marshall Sun, 29 May 2005 16:57:00 GMT
Over the past few months I've been using my Treo 650 pretty heavily, and while there is still a lot to love about it, I've been finding myself frustrated more often than not. I've come up with a list of pros and cons to the Treo for reference.
What I like about the Treo:
The keypad. Being able to type SMS text messages, web address URLs, and so on with a real QWERTY keypad is a wonderful thing. The keypad was what first attracted me to the Treo, and it is still by far my favorite feature.
The chat view. At first I wasn't sure what to make of this, but I've grown to love it. The Treo's SMS viewer organizes messages into conversations, as though they were instant-message windows. This is extraordinarily useful when trying to find a bit of info in an SMS message; you just open up the conversation and scroll up. Much, much better than the usual phone SMS view that's simply a long list of sender names.
The games. The Treo has some really nice stylus-based games. I particularly enjoy Bejeweled 2 and ScummVM, the emulator for classic LucasArts games like the Secret of Monkey Island and Sam and Max.
The available software. One of the other things that drew me to the Treo was the wealth of software written for the Palm OS. And most of it has a common design to it, so it's easy to learn.
The web browser. The included Blazer web browser does a very nice job of rendering pages and making the web usable on a small screen.
Full GSM support. It's a quad-band phone, so it will work on any GSM network world-wide. It has Class 10 EDGE support, so it will support the fastest data available on US GSM networks.
What I don't like:
The instability. The Treo makes Windows 3.x and the classic Mac OS seem rock-solid. It spontaneously resets itself at least twice a day, and for a while it was resetting itself every time I tried to do anything in the built-in mail client (the solution was to delete all messages, attachments, and settings). The phone will shut off at random. Apparently a lot of Treo 650 owners are experiencing instability, and are being told to erase all their Treo data and reinstall their programs, one by one, until the resets start again. The trouble is that the resets are random, so it's difficult to tell. And the very fact that the device is so extremely touchy makes me afraid to install anything, yet installable software is one of the reasons I wanted a Treo in the first place.
The stylus. Not the actual hardware, but the seemingly random requirements that it be used when the 5-way navigator would work just as well. MyBible, for example, is almost entirely keypad-navigable, except for the translation menu, which I use all the time. Blazer is about half-usable with just the keypad. I keep finding myself happily using the Treo with one hand, only to run across some application that requires me to switch hands, pull out the stylus, tap a button, replace the stylus, and switch hands again.
The button limitations. The Treo was made to be a PDA, which becomes troublesome when playing games. The only buttons available to games are the classic Palm buttons (i.e. not the letters), and the Treo seems to have a very hard time recognizing more than one button being pressed at once. Emulated Nintendo games are thus quite difficult to play: Mario can't run and jump at the same time, the Double Dragon guy can't jump at all, etc. Stylus-based games work great, but anything requiring keypresses is more frustrating than fun.
The phone button/menu. The Treo has a green phone button, and it is a user interface nightmare. Most of the time, pressing it will take you to the main phone menu (which is different from the main application menu, accessed via the Home key), unless you're already in the menu, in which case it will take you to the Recent Call List, unless you're in the Recent Call List, in which case it will dial the highlighted number. If you're in the Contact List and have a name highlighted, the green phone button will take you back to the main phone menu, but if you have a number highlighted, it will dial the number.
The thing is, since the green phone button is the only way to get to the main phone menu, I keep dialing numbers by accident, trying to get back to the menu. To make matters worse, the red phone button is overloaded as well: usually it turns the display on and off, unless you're in a call, in which case it will hang up the call, unless you hold it down, in which case it will turn off the phone. Several times I've pressed the green phone button while in the main phone menu, gotten the recent call list, decided I didn't want the recent call list, and then either 1) pressed the green phone button to return to the menu and accidentally dialed the number, or 2) pressed the red phone button as an attempt to cancel, and shut off the phone's display instead.
The camera. It's a VGA camera, and the quality is so poor that it's really not good for much of anything. I knew that it was a low-resolution camera going in, but I had hoped that the reports of "improved camera" in the 650 meant the photos would have at least a little detail to them. Not so.
The Bluetooth limitations. One of the things I love about Bluetooth-enabled phones is that they can be linked with a personal computer to do all sorts of things. The Mac Address Book will display Caller ID info for incoming calls, allowing you to answer the call, send it to voicemail, or send an SMS reply. Salling Clicker lets you remote control iTunes, Keynote, PowerPoint, DVD Player, or any number of other programs. And the computer can treat the phone as a modem and use the phone's EDGE connection for internet access when none is otherwise available.
Unfortunately, the Treo's Bluetooth implementation renders most of these unusable.
It doesn't send caller ID information to the computer, and doesn't support background processes to do so either. It doesn't support external connections from the computer to determine when the phone is nearby and auto-connect the remote control services. And if you want to use it as a modem, you have to put it in "Dial-Up Networking Mode" which disables all the other Bluetooth services. It just barely works -- far from one would expect from an advanced smartphone.
The Mac desktop software. Palm Desktop started life as Claris Organizer, a product for the classic Mac OS. At first it was very nice for those who liked the Mac back then, but now Palm has essentially abandoned the Mac version, which was sloppily ported to OS X and left to die. Now it's an ugly, hard-to-use mess that reeks of ancient Mac OS. A piece of software called the Missing Sync helps to remedy this a bit, but even that doesn't quite feel at home on OS X. Compared to the strong synchronization support in OS X for Sony Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola, and other brand devices with PDA-like features, the Treo's desktop story is disappointing.
The lack of multitasking. The Palm OS has been, from the beginning, a single-tasking operating system. It's kind of like the DOS Shell in MS-DOS 4+: it appears to run more than one thing at once, but it really can't. This means that useful background processes -- for example, watching for incoming calls and forwarding the caller ID info to a computer -- aren't possible. Palm OS Cobalt, which has been available to developers for over a year now, is supposed to fix this, but PalmOne is still using the hacked-together Palm OS 5.4 for all its current devices, and Palm says the Treo 650 won't be upgradable to Cobalt.
This last point -- the operating system -- is really the root of most of the problems I have with the device. The current Palm OS simply is not made for smartphones: it's a PDA operating system with phone functionality hacked on, and it shows. The lack of effective keypad navigation, the confusion over menus, the constant crashing -- all of this is due to an operating system that has been pushed past its limits.
So now I've begun looking again. I'm looking for a smartphone with an operating system designed for smartphones. Windows Mobile suffers from the same history: it's a Pocket PC operating system with phone support hacked on, plus it's Windows and having a Start Menu on my cell phone just seems wrong. (So would an Apple menu, for that matter -- both are marks of forcing a desktop computer user interface onto a totally different kind of device.) I also don't particularly care to help Microsoft monopolize yet another market when there are other companies focused on that market with good products.
That pretty much narrows it down to Symbian. Sony Ericsson has the P910 with a QWERTY keypad, stylus, and Symbian UIQ interface. Nokia has a variety of Symbian-based Series 60 devices that just use the standard phone keypad. Right now I'm leaning toward the Nokia phones, largely because Series 60 is a very nice, made-for-one-hand interface, solving the stylus issue. But that would mean giving up the beautiful Treo keypad; the Nokia phones with keypads don't appeal to me. Decisions, decisions...
One day, maybe Palm will come out with a Treo that has 3G support, a Linux-based PalmOS designed for smartphones, and a 2+ megapixel camera, and I'll go back to the Treo again. Until then, the Nokia N-Series is looking pretty nice...
