Setting the Treo Record Straight

I'll second that. I don't trust that guy a bit. He obviously has a vested interest in giving out glowing reviews.

Case in point: I bought a piece of crap Seido retractable earbud headset for like $30 from his site, which had received a great review, only to realize upon its arrival how flawed it was, in several ways. If I can write an honest critical review on a piece of hardware in 10 minutes, he should be able to, as well. It is, after all, his frickin job.

Peace Out
Alan

The funniest thing I found about the piece was how Andrew calls the current 320x320 Treos (650, 680, 700p, 755p etc) "Large screened".

HAS it come to this already? I do not consider, no matter how bright the backlight is or how tight the pixel density is, a 320x320 small square screen "large" by any stretch of the imagination. And this is just exacerbated by the wacky ways in which differnt Palm OS developers code their programs and scale their fonts.

For example, I have 20/20 vision and it irritates me to no end to see a half-arsed Palm OS port of a game utilizing just a fraction of the 320x320 screen and with fonts so small they are nigh illegible. At least Astraware can usually be counted on in this regard.

I HIGHLY doubt we'll ever see these fresh new formfactor Treos produced by Palm (at least under its current management and ownership). All they want to do is churn out endless permutations of the same Treo 600 design, rebrand similar looking "me too" WM decvices and adding and subtracting reshuffling features throughout the lineup.

On another note:

I went to the local Apple store yesterday evening and spent some solid time playing around with an iPod Touch. I still prefer the iPhone of course, but there's no doubting that the Touch excels in so many areas where Palm has fallen flat on its face. Of course, there are some areas about Palm OS & Palm's products that I find incredibly and inexplicably missing on Apple's products. Apple's "design zen" reminds me a lot of the "Zen of Palm'. Apple has sterling build quality, styling, sleekness, and UI but then makes their mobile devices overly dumbed-down by placing form over function. For example, the Touch's inability to add new calendar appointments on the device is impossibly mind-bogglingly dumb. And the photo viewer app feels so dumbed down in comparison to a 4-year old version of SplashPhoto or AcidImage on Palm OS that it makes me want to weep.

So my ideal device still doesn't exist but would be some bizarre hybrid of a Palm TX and an iPhone (but with EVDO).

Pilot 1000-->Pilot 5000-->PalmPilot Pro-->IIIe-->Vx-->m505-->T|T-->T|T2-->T|C-->T|T3-->T|T5-->TX-->Treo 700P

Look at his mad photoshop Skillz. All it takes for Palm to turn around is to listen to his suggestions!

... why didn't *we* ever think about offering Palm advice?

USR Palm Pilot 1000 --> Palm Pilot Professional --> TRG SuperPilot --> Palm IIIc --> Palm V --> Palm M505 --> Palm M515 --> Tungsten T|2 --> Treo 600 --> LifeDrive --> iPhone

@gazpatcho & atrizza

I felt compelled to write something as I think some of the critisms of Treonauts are unfair particularly since, if you read the blog regularly, Andrew has been quite a critic of Palm, more so recently especially with the ill fated and perhaps dumbest product ever, the Foleo.

As for his product reviews I agree that a lot are positive, for the most part those products are probably well deserving (i've only got four or five accessories for my Treo and his opinions of those are fairly accurate) - he rarely reviews terrible products as it's clear to me his reviews are very thorough, comparitive, detailed and take more than 10 minutes to write - if I was him I wouldn't put the time and effort into reviewing products that are terrible.

If not a question of whether you can write a review in 10 minutes. It's a question of whther the review is useful to a reader. Otherwise you might as well read the CNET reviews which seem to be written in 10 minutes also.

I actually find the pictures most useful especially the comparitive ones he does.

So I think your comments are unfair.

Mstein

Outside of the criticism of the "LARGE DISPLAY" category (which I admit is a laughable stretch), I don't hear much substantive talk about his overall point - Treo was so far ahead of everyone that their current fleet looks older and out of touch than it really is.

I have to agree to some measure. (Granted I AM FRUSTRATED OVER PALM'S LACK OF NEW LINUX "PALM OS II" DEVELOPMENT.) I had an iPhone for 13 days (has to be returned within 14 to get a full refund). It just couldn't replace my Treo 680:
1. The text input was frustratingly slow & requires two hands all the time.
2. Lack of basic office apps!!!
3. No corporate email other than Safari
4. Speaking of Safari...It is sweet, but you cannot use it to replace corporate email because you have to constantly adjust the size of the screen (pinching).
5. "Multi-touch" lives up to its name in several ways. You will be "touching" the screen multiple times to do Treo "single-touch" tasks. For example, it has "multi-touch" dialing (no "one-touch" dialing).

(BTW. I am one of those despised but proud Apple enthusiasts...but iPhone can't replace my 680.)

RE the so-called "large screen" - it really depends on what you're comparing it with. Sit it next to a PDA or an iPhone and yeah, it's small. Sit it next to your standard dumbphone, though, and it's huge. It's not that much of a stretch to call it "large-screened".

Anyway, he's right. Sure, he has a vested interest in selling stuff from his Treo store, but the fact remains that you can't find many (or any) phones as simple or user-friendly as the Treo with the same touchscreen+exposed QWERTY spec.

Freak,

Say hello to the present:

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9037858&pageNumber=1

^^ Troll,

None of those have an exposed keyboard. http://tinyurl.com/2hy2lj

Freak you clown, why the name calling? ;)

The link I attached related to smartphone usability. Attached keyboard or not - Palm OS isn't as smart or as usable as it once was.

Just trying to remind you it's 2007, not 2004.

jca!

Palm OS isn't as smart or as usable as it once was.

Maybe you meant it quite differently than I am reading it, but I don't see how this is true. For this to be true, Palm would have to have made the OS "dumber" and removed some of the previous usability. That is not my experience when comparing the current OS to previous ones. Are you saying that the current OS (5.x) is less smart and less usable than OS3 or OS4? Or are you saying that in comparison to other current mobile OS's, Palm isn't as smart or usable? Just what are you saying?


Thinking about Vista? Think again: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt
Want an alternative? Try this: http://www.ubuntu.com/ or http://www.mepis.org/

In other words... Handspring brought the Treo to life, and Palm has been "busy" stunting the Treo's potential to live ever since.

Even out of the shadow of 3Com years ago, Palm still acts as though they have the iron corporate jaws upon their throat and they can't innovate, just move things around to look busy. Here's the only "phone" that Palm put out before buying up Handspring and the Treo: http://www.infosyncworld.com/reviews/n/3323.html (Tungsten W). It's a cell phone and didn't even have a frikkin built-in microphone!

Time will tell if Palm will get their act together, or instead put their resources into car radios (with a Treo companion cable of course) or some other ridiculous distraction now that the Fooleo got 86'd. In 2003 the Treo 600 was revolutionary. Coming up on 2008 its successors are basically nostalgic throwbacks, with less battery power, lousier flash cards, and an aging operating system. Time to get cracking, Palm.

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**Another vote for a >100MB RAM Treo**

It's a sad state of affairs that anyone should get excited about a re-release of an overdue bugfix for serious problems on an EOL device that sat unpatched for over a year without any attention from Palm. For a six-hundred-dollar device, the Treo 700p's inability to stay paired with a bluetooth headset really exuded "value."

'Guess they had all their engineers busy with that company savior called the Fooleo?

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**Another vote for a >100MB RAM Treo**

> ...with a price below 100 $ this actually smells good...

I guess PALM is pretty much stuck with sub-$100 price now, huh - NOWHERE has it been rumored the price is HIGHER!

Gotta luv them rumors!