3 months with the Treo 750
I know I come across as a whiner sometimes about gadgets, especially phones. It's just that I want one device that can do everything from making a phone call to opening my garage door to sending tri-corder data back to my starship in orbit.
The Treo 750 hasn't disappointed me, at all. I honestly can't think of the first thing to say about this phone, good or bad. It is so good, that I don't dwell on any bad things about it, yet there isn't a killer feature either. This is good! I don't always have this warning light in the back of my mind that I may have missed a critical phone call or important email. It just works really, really well. Here is a brief review.
Low-lights:
- There is no way to turn it off, you have to pull the battery. You can turn off the radio stack by holding down the red button, but no way to save the battery completely.
- There is an issue with the audio gateway when using a Bluetooth headset and initiating Voice Command (VC). It routes the audio for VC confirmations to the handset rather than the headset. If you use a button on the handset to initiate VC, all works as expected.
- No easy way to start the dial pad. On most phones, if you are on the home screen, you can start dialing and it goes right to a dial pad. You have to navigate to the dial pad by hitting the green dial button, then using the navigation buttons to select "dial pad"
- **BIGGEST GRIPE** - You can't charge the battery with the USB cable! I found this out the hard way by going on a trip with only the USB cable, and no charger! Can't all these device manufacturers just use a mini-usb cable to charge (and sync)?
- No camera
- I wish the keyboard was more like the Blackjack where the numeric keys don't require an "alt" key press.
- Windows Mobile 5 notifications - even after I read an email, it still sometimes has a left over notification that is simply cleared using the left soft key. Microsoft needs to figure out how to remove these as I read email/check voicemail.
- No AT&T UMTS in Denver!
- Tether is an additional cost
Highlights:
- 3 reboots in 3 months (1 while in foreign country). I have only had to pull the battery 3 times. Usually, this is because the buttons do strange things, not because it looses the ability to communicate.
- One handed navigation. Palm has done a great job of adding it's own flavor to Windows Mobile 5 and made this device totally accessible with one hand. I think I have taken the stylus out twice.
- Battery life-I can go 2 days without a recharge even with medium email traffic
- Stun button. The slider on the top allows me to go into silent mode without having to traverse the profiles chasm every time. Great feature in a meeting.
- The "search" function is right on the home screen, nice touch from Treo.
- You can turn the volume of the speaker to "11"
- No Camera - allows me to take it into datacenters
- Treo has announced that an upgrade to Windows Mobile 6 will be available in the near future.
