Palm Treo – We Care Why?

Not sure which product you’re talking about but I’d probably agree. I’ve had a Treo 700p for years now.
Every alleged update has been nothing more than removing the antenna stub or changing the color of the case.

I’m a loyal Palm-ist in spite of this. The 700p is a stable, solid product that does what I want it to. Yes, I would like a faster, more capable Treo, but I find the 700 to still be better than the competition.

Let’s face it – the iPhone is overpriced, ridiculously overhyped, and can’t do anything the Treo can do with the exception of shifting the display 90 degrees.

Most of the other current phones use Windows. I’ve had enough of Windows on desktops; I’m not going to reboot my phone every time I need to make a call or check mail. This is confirmed by everyone I know who uses the OS, including cell phone salespeople.

The Centro just confuses me. It’s like a Palm for people who require a pretty colored phone. People whose main complaint is that it doesn’t do Flash.

Palm needs to wake up and put out a significant update for their business customers (it’s a business phone for the most part).

Ymmv.

From this summary of the new Palm (see http://blog.treonauts.com/2008/07/sprint-treo-8-1.html for a nice review) you can see that this phone does offer some unique features:

Palm and Sprint Introduce the Treo 800w Smartphone – the first Windows Mobile 6.1 Treo smartphone offering a slimmer and lighter body, fast 3G EvDO Rev. A data speeds, built-in WiFi and GPS, 2.0 Megapixel Camera, Bluetooth 2.0, high resolution 320×320 touchscreen, 256MB user memory as well as unique Palm software enhancements.

Palm was good for their time. When I had my Treo 650 there wasn’t much on the market that compared to what I could do with it. However, since then, like you said, all Palm has done is added little improvements and modifications that only had the Palm fanatics interested. They need to really do something that stands out. The hardware is nothing better than its competition. The only thing they have really going is the combination of a full keyboard and a touchscreen. But there are others out there that offer the same now as well.

Maybe they should develop a new phone that runs the blackberry OS and integrate that with their touchscreen.

Palm was good; I had a Tungsten C that did the job for almost five years; synchronising with two desk tops and and a portable and keeping all their info in sync. My mistake was upgrading to a Treo, thinking I could replace the Tungsten and my cell-phone with one device, and gain mobile e-mail.

The first Treo was effectively DOA, locking up solid after a few days before I had a chance to fully explore the ramifications for my work methods. After some difficulties with Palm customer support, they gave me a return authorization, and persuaded me to purchase a 2nd Treo so I wouldn’t have to wait for the 1st one to be processed and replaced.

The 2nd one worked, sort of; I never did manage to make the security function (lock after a certain time) work consistently. More to the point, I now realized that I couldn’t sync with more than one machine. I spent some more money on a Laplink product, which did the job, but in a very primitive fashion (eg. didn’t handle multiple or repeated appointments). After some more fussing around I decide to give Palm Desktop a try, thinking I could live with the lame desktop’s 1980’s look if I could at least make it work. Guess what – it wouldn’t run on any of my machines, in fact, wouldn’t install on the portable.

Then the customer support run-around started, during which I discovered (was informed!) that Paqlm only supported their software on single-processor machines (thus very little sold over the last couple of years) and on plain-vanilla XP (no media edition, no tablet!) Ironically, the one machine I own that met those specifications was the one on which it wouldn’t install, but the tech rep wiggled out of that one by pointing out that laptops were not supported either!

Back to customer service, to get a return authorization for the 2nd Treo, at which point I got into an argument about he accessories (case, car charger, etc.) I had purchased with the 1st Treo. they didn’t want totake them back, because these were now beyond the 30 day return period. After several hours and more phone calls, they agreed to authorize their return as well. It took aver a month, and several more phone calls to actually have the return labels e-mailed to me.

Not to waste more energy and space, it took four more months, and endless phone calls to get the actual refunds processed, and in the end I was still out a few dollars because they couldn’t do the math right. In that time I was lied to several times, byt being told that action would happen within 24 hours, and so forth.

I would not recommend a Palm under any conditions, because their customer service frankly stinks.

Oh, and when I returned the 2nd Treo I went and got a Blackberry Curve, and all has been well!

So, I have have been a long-time Palm user. I think my first was a Palm III. I loved it for what it was then, I love it for what it is now. Until the iPhone came along, I abhorred any other user interface available put the Palm. Is it just me, is the WinMobile interface virtually useless without a stylus or 4-way button? With the Treo, nearly EVERY thing I do is with a finger on the screen. I LOVE it!

Alas, the iPhone 3G’s intuitive interface, 16GB of storage and faster INet connections have pulled me away from the Treo.

Is the Palm line dead. Absolutely. But I’ll be shedding many tears at its funeral unless someone either eclipses Windows Mobile or Microsoft revamps to work better on the smaller, handheld devices.