Treo 650

Yes my most recent phone was giving me a hell of a time, dropping almost every call I tried to make. Sprint ran some tests and the boneheads decided it wasn’t defective. Lovely. Well lucky me I bought it at Costco and they have an unbeatable return policy… satisfaction guaranteed. So, I just had to scrape together the receipt and everything that came with the phone and take it in. They would have replaced it as well with an identical phone but at this point I didn’t want to worry about it and had decided to upgrade (like I could resist the opportunity huh?), so they gave me CASH back, full refund. I’m owner now of perhaps one of the coolest phones ever made– not perfect, but close.

So far great reception… in areas that I couldn’t use other phones I seem to be able to talk on this phone just fine, like certain parts of the basement and even the restroom at work. Yes, I just spent my visit to the bathroom reading one of Josh’s recent rants about Walmart– it’s not like using a regular computer but web sites are much more browsable and readable. And I’ve been bad about keeping up on blogs… now I have no excuse. Thanks for the bathroom reading material Josh 😉 My only complaint about internet on this thing is that there is NO flash player for Palm OS. From what I understand it is simply because Palm One has not licensed Flash for Palm OS… even Pocket PC has a flash player (for those of you who don’t know why I care– this means no Strong Bad e-mails on my phone. Damn.)

I’ve had mixed success installing third party applications on it so far– one freeware program lets me watch movies I’ve ripped from DVD on my phone, it rules. The screen on this thing is beautiful.

Another was supposed to allow me to use regular mp3s as my ringers, but after a day’s use it started freezing my phone up, so I’ll have to keep playing with it to figure out what the problem there is. It’d have been nice if the phone had included this feature natively. No biggie, since I most often have my phone on vibrate.

The camera is, like with most phones, more of a gimmick than anything. Just 640×480 pictures, but in decent lighting they come out surprisingly good for a camera phone– I’m more likely to snap a shot here or there with this phone as opposed to my previous phones, especially since it’s so easy to add someone’s picture to their contact information using this phone.

I’m sure you can see I didn’t buy this phone for keeping track of my schedule or e-mails or whatever (though apparently I can install a version of messenger on it, woot.) I DO love the keyboard on it though– text messaging is a breeze and I’m sure IM probably won’t be too bad either. Very well backlit, too.

Oh, and this thing has bluetooth as well (maybe an older standard of bluetooth that’s not quite as fast as what’s available now, but bluetooth nonetheless– should work just fine for wireless headsets).

There was a problem with voice call quality when the phone was initially released– this has been cleared up with the latest firmware update from Sprint / Palm.

I have to say I love this phone– I can listen to MP3s on it, watch videos (the reports I’ve heard say that if you turn the radio off– so it’s not trying to pick up or maintain a signal, and you’re basically just getting the palm functions without phone functions– that you can get several hours of video / mp3 playback on a single charge. The screen may not be huge, but it’s big enough, clear enough and vibrant enough to enjoy dvds on and for the kind of battery life you get it can’t be beat.)

I always thought PDA phones were too bulky for my tastes but the Treo is just right– not quite as small as your average candy-bar shaped phone, but really just a tad wider than most, and it’s thinner than my last flip-phone. (This is the first non-flip phone I’ve ever owned). Beats the heck out of those ginormous Pocket PC phones. This really isn’t hard to carry around in my pocket, it’s no more noticable than my last phone, though it does need to be handled a little more carefully.

If you needed both a PDA and a new cell phone and could get this at a discount– I’d highly recommend it. I still need to install messenger on it as well as some old-school video games and some scriptures, but otherwise… I’m a pretty happy camper, and I get much more use out of this than I ever have out of a cell phone.

P.S. I really should whore my site out to google ads like Josh, maybe get a few nickels for these posts on tech toys, heh.