Windows Mobile 6 Treo 750 Update Announced in Australia

The 750 really is drop-dead gorgeous. I know we're not supposed to say that about Treos, and I'm spoiling my reputation as a Treo curmudgeon, but the blue/black soft-touch finish and the silver-and-black keys totally *make* the device from an aesthetic standpoint. I'm still attached to the old Sammy i500, but in the 750 Palm has finally created a Treo that surpasses it in look-and-feel, fit-and-finish.

I've been forcing myself to get used to Windows Mobile for the last few months, just so I can say I gave it its full due, and have come to accept it's utility. I like the Today screen. But I can't bring myself to love WinMo as a whole. Strangely, for all the complaints you read about Blazer on Palm OS, I greatly prefer it over IE on WinMo, which all too frequently lays out pages in ways that are completely unreadable. There are so many little touches in Palm OS that individually seem inconsequential, but make you scream a little when they're missing. Just take one application, Contacts, as an example: auto-complete of company names, NOT stupidly auto-completing data into an empty field just because I am navigating past it with the 5-way, having email/home/work/mobile phone numbers grouped together instead of being spread across two or three screen-scrolls, having a date-picker that, well, works for entering birthdays or appointments.

Unless WinMo 6 has some huge usability improvement, I'll go back to the Palm OS Treo 680 I'm sure--after I've performed adequate WinMo penance. But I'll definitely miss the eye-catching, great-feeling enclosure of the 750.

Oh, and please... "Slow Blues" is the only decent ringtone on the whole phone. The choices are better than the Nokias I've got in my desk drawer here, but that's really not saying much. And I refuse to pay for ringtones. Not even as penance.

David Beers
Pikesoft Mobile Computing
www.pikesoft.com/blog

^^ You're not the only one who refuses to pay. Especially when networks like to charge you more for a ringtone than they do for an actual song! I've had a review copy of GoTreo Software's Ringcare Desktop for the last month and it's quite a good little app for making tones out of your own music library. I now have The Darkness' hard-rockin' opening riff+guitar solo from 'Is It Just Me?' (http://tinyurl.com/ytcs5r) as mine. It's much better suited to my macho tough-guy image. ;)

Review will appear sometime in the next week or two, assuming I can find an hour or two to actually sit down and do it.

(ack. that's Gx5's RingCare. GoTreo make VolumeCare...)

I'm amazed that anyone even pays for applications to convert MP3s to ringtones. Why wouldn't you just use minitones? http://tinyurl.com/yspyj8 . It's free and it seems to do a great job of converting an mp3 or wav AND (did I mention) it's free. Regardless, if such an app didn't exist, I'd settle for any ringtone that was free - Like I say I'm amazed anyone invests any money in any aspect of a phone's ringtone.

Minitones is good, but not the same as Ringcare. Whereas Minitones will just let you use mp3s on an SD card, Ringcare will convert+compress them to a different format and save them to internal memory.

Actually, minitones does copy the MP3 file to the internal memory. It doesn't seem to compress the file at all, but isn't that what an mp3 file is - compressed file? If you compress too much more the quality will be so bad you may as well sing the song in the voice recorder yourself! Besides, with a couple of clicks, minitones will trim the copied file down to a short ringtone-sized clip - save space and doesn't touch the original mp3 file.

But anyone with a pc and any sound software (like freeware Audacity) can compress any audio file to whatever quality the like - trim - mix it - add effects...

If all this is too hard, hold your 680 up to the TV when one of those annoying ring tone adds come on, record using the built in sound recorder and select 'copy to ringtone'.

If that is too hard, place the Treo into its original box and pull out your good ol' Nokia 3210 - my Dad will show you how to use that one!

Well, the Treo speaker is not exactly a audiophile's dream, so the quality difference is not that noticeable. And all those freeware PC proggys are great for people like you and me - tech-savvy and enthusiast enough to post to a Palm fansite - but most people have trouble working out how to check their email, let alone edit/convert sound files. ;) Ringcare greatly simplifies the process.