So, I've had a Treo for almost 3.5 years now, my first was the Treo 650, I got that on my Birthday (Feb 9th) 2005, it was a great little phone, and wonderful Palm. I "upgraded" to the Treo 755p almost a year ago (July 04th, to be exact), and switched providers from Cingular/AT&T/New AT&T/whatever their name is, to Sprint, because of 2 things, #1, Sprint has the EDGE network (downloads are about 3 times faster on Sprint), and #2 because Sprint's UNLIMITED DATA plan is about $15 (All the others are around $40, or at least they were in July of 2007). I realize that for some people, the BIG news right now is the $199 8-gig, 3G Apple iPhone (or $299 for the 16-gig), with a $30 dataplan.... But, the only thing I like about the iPhone is the Palm Emulator software (Thus I could run all my existing Palm apps on an iPhone), other than that, it's no big news to me.
So, I just finished writing a review about the Palm Treo 755p, and thought, I might as well post it to my blog as well...
This phone is simply the best. I use it to sync my corporate email, contacts, calendar, and tasks. It syncs every 5 minutes, and I ALWAYS have enough batterylife to get through the day. It's a LiOn battery which has no memory effect, thus I plug it in every night, and have seen no degradation in performance over the last year (in theory it should cycle 300-500 times:
http://www.batteryuniversity.com/parttwo-34.htm) I've been a Palm fan since Palm II and sometimes I wish for the graffiti back, but I've downloaded a program called Graffiti Anywhere, and that helps for those times I'd rather write than type. The greatest thing about Palms, is the amount of FREE software available:
http://freewarepalm.com/ as an example I could never get this much software for a Blackberry, or even an iPhone, without being nickeled and dimed for every little app (maybe the iPhone will get more free software over the next 5 years). Sprints data network is SOLID, I can easily DL 1 meg of data in UNDER a minute. I have an external Bluetooth GPS device that works great with Telenav--I bought a 3-5 year subscription via Telenav which makes it about $5/month instead of $10 thru Sprint. Although, hopefully Google Maps will work with a GPS on Palm sometime in the future. There are a lot of things that probably could be quicker, but when you think of everything this phone can do, waiting 1 or 2 seconds isn't a big deal, my first cellphone would pick up, hang up, and dial, that's it, no calendar, no calculator, nothing. I used to carry around 3 devices, a typical geek, but with the invention of the Treo, I have consolidated, it is a computer, internet browser, day planner, telephone, alpha-numeric pager, 2-way communicator (pinger.com), and many more things (a newspaper, a flashlight, an MP3 player, a TV, a video player, a camera/camcorder, a scratchpaper/notepad, a book/ebook reader, language translator/dictionary, "gameboy"/entertainer, graphing calculator, scientific calculator, mortgage calculator, navigator, memo recorder, password keeper, and assistant). I'm not sure I would want to live without my Palm Treo; I could, but it would be like losing my sight, or my hearing, the world just wouldn't be as easy to get around in.
If you are a Blackberry person, or an iPhone person, then go ahead and be one, the Palm Treo probably isn't for you, in fact you might even like the WinCE version better, but if you really want to get to the guts of life, and enjoy every flower (ie free application written for Palm devices), then the Treo is, Simply The Best.
http://dskye.blogspot.com/2008/06/treo-755p.html
