There's a perception in some circles that a Palm computing device, still sometimes referred to as a PalmPilot even though the PalmPilot name was retired about four years ago, is "just an organizer." While it is a very good organizer, the Treo 600 blows that tired old misperception completely out of the water. Palm's Handspring Treo 600 is at the very high end of the PDA spectrum. It provides full PalmOS 5.2 support, with a fast 144MHz ARM processor, a full GSM (quad-band) or CDMA cell phone, full proxyless web browsing (not just WML) and email support, synchronization with Palm Desktop and Microsoft Outlook, a 640 by 480 camera with the ability to email directly from the camera, reasonable MP3 stereo sound (with extra software), an SD/MMC card slot, and a USB connection for downloading data and PalmOS applications and for uploading data to your desktop. The Treo 600 is everything you need in a handheld.
I bought my first digital camera at the first JavaOne in San Francisco in the late 1990s. It was a Kodak DC25; its "high-res" mode was a whopping 640 by 480, it stored its pictures in a proprietary undocumented format (mangled TIFF) on CompactFlash cards, came with software to upload pictures to Windows 95 and Mac OS 8, and cost about $250. My second (not counting the odd cheapo tethered webcam) is a refurbished HP620 I bought my wife for a vacation; this camera cost about $150, takes pictures in resolutions up to 1200 by 1024, and stores photos as standard JPEG files. My third digital camera is my Treo 600 cell phone. It cost about as much as both other cameras put together, but then it's also a fast PalmOS device with 32MB of RAM and an SD slot. I know it's mainly a PalmOS device and a phone, but having it be a tiny digital camera (though not as tiny as this!), for not much more than the original "new" price of the Treo 180 it replaces, makes it a darn good deal.
What's in the BoxThe phone comes ready to use, with the following accessories:
What's not included? You can buy, for extra cost:
If you want one of the above accessories, buy it with the phone to save shipping. Just go to www.PalmOne.com and follow the link to Treo Accessories. Another source for accessories (and Treos too) is TreoCentral.com. They list many accessories including, a combination (phone and stereo music) pair of headphones. |
One of the hardest parts of writing this review was simply getting my hands on a device. Demand was seriously outranking supply in October 2003, when the first Treo 600s were shipping to Sprint customers. The Treo 600 comes in two flavors: CDMA (for Sprint) and GSM (for Cingular, T-Mobile, AT&T, and others). CDMA phones are charcoal grey; GSM units are shiny chrome. (See the GSM Vs. CDMA sidebar). In Canada, where I live, CDMA is used by Bell Canada and by Telus, and GSM by Rogers and Fido (Microcell). Since Handspring (like other cell-phone makers that sell direct) gets money from the carriers to sell the phone with a contract, for a long time you couldn't buy one at all without a plan. But as of February 2004, you can buy an unlocked Treo 600 (at least in GSM), which you should be able to use with any GSM carrier. My existing service with Rogers and their support of GSM and GPRS made the GSM model of the Treo 600 a natural choice for me, even though Rogers didn't "support" the phone when I started (they do now). The delay in supporting Rogers was due to, as one of Handspring's marketing communications people put it, the Treo not having been "optimized" for the various networks. Now I'm no expert on the nuances of GSM technology, but as a techno-old-timer, the term "optimized" sounds to me like a thinly-disguised euphemism for "adapted to the standards violations of your particular carrier" or at least to "the standards variations" of your carrier.
As it turns out, the phones from all of the carriers except one seem to be the same. I compared a Generic phone from Handspring with a Rogers (Canada) phone. The firmware revision is the same (2.05), and the "software revision" only a few dot-points different (1.08-INTL versus 1.11-INTL), which is probably explainable by the few months between their shipping dates. Handspring's Treo overview page does note that phones purchased for Cingular in the U.S. are optimized for that network and warns that "Customers who use Cingular-branded Treo 600 smartphones on other GSM/GPRS networks may not receive optimal voice reception or data speed." It doesn't say what happens when you use a generic phone on the Cingular network, and I was unable to try my phone on the Cingular network due to not living in their coverage area. I did manage to borrow a Fido/Microcell SIM, and the phone seemed to work fine on their GSM network.
Everyone who sees the Treo 600 is impressed by how well-built it looks (and feels, among the people whom I deign to allow to touch it). Treo 600 looks a lot different from the older Treo by not being a flip phone, but more the shape of a modern cell phone. Compare the older Treo (on the left, with the flip closed, covering the keyboard), the Treo 600 (middle), and my wife's little free-with-activation AudioVox on the right. Note that the older Treo is very roughly the same size as the current Tungsten devices from Palm.
The screen is bright and beautiful color (160 by 160 by 24). So bright, in fact, that I didn't replace my pocket flashlight when I lost it; I live in the country where, with no streetlamps and no neighbors, it gets very dark on moonless nights. Yet I can use my Treo 600 to walk around the house at night without crashing into things.
What's missing form the Treo 600 compared to the older Treo line?
The feature I thought I'd miss most is "Binky," the friendly flashing LED. I drive a lot in the country because I live there and, at night, that friendly flashing LED helps me see whether I'm in range of any cell towers. It happens outside of cities, you know. Line of sight and all that: you go behind a big hill and poof! No coverage. Binky has kept me company for many hours, but based on the initial information on Handspring's web site, Binky seemed to have been deleted in a good cause -- battery life. More about that later. I was therefore pleased to power up my new Treo 600 and find that Binky had survived, although in a smaller incarnation.
What really is gone is the 180's annoying delay when you started a call. Like most PDA/phone combos, the Treo 180/300 is really two microcomputer chips in one cabinet. There is the Palm device (a moderately fast Motorola Dragonball in the 180/300, and a much faster 144MHz Arm processor -- actually a TI OMAP 1510 -- in the Treo 600), and the telephone hardware, which is also a microchip. Perhaps due to a glitch in the communications between them, my older 180 left the screen totally blank for a couple of seconds when you placed a call. And that was after a second or two of non-response, where you were never sure it had noticed that you'd tapped an on-screen phone shortcut. Treo 600 fixes this: you tap on the screen and instantly see the Dialing... screen. Also improved is the start-up screen; when you power the phone on or off you get a nice chime sound and the Tower screen:
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In fact, the whole Treo 600 experience is more sound-oriented. There are blips for gaining and losing coverage, touching the screen when not expected, dialing phone digits, and so on. Sometimes it gets excessive, but you can turn many of these on or off individually, either in application's Preferences menu or in the Prefs application itself. And you can switch all sounds off with the big sound/silent switch on the top of the phone.
When Two Become OneHandspring was created a few years back when Palm's original designer Jeff Hawkins and a few other senior Palm people left to form a new company. They made a series of innovative handhelds -- up to the Treo 300-- and sold a lot of them. But not enough to pay the rent. As of fall, 2003, Handspring has moved back in with Palm. The new company is called "palmOne," and the Treo is branded palmOne on the front of the phone, although mine still had the Handspring logo on the outside of the box. |
One thing that's gone that I do not miss is the flip-phone-style lid. While it provides a nice protector for the screen and keyboard, one of the long-standing tech support issues with the 180 line was that the cable between the phone's body and the earpiece in the flip would break after being opened and closed some random number of times. If the phone were still in warranty, you could get a factory replacement. If not, you could pay a bunch to have it repaired, or if you were very brave, repair it yourself.
Installation of the SIM card in the phone was trivial, as expected, and it connected to my cellular provider (Rogers) in seconds. I have not had any glitches with connections, although once, when I was in an area with very poor reception from Rogers, the phone locked onto arch-rival Fido's signal and apparently connected. I didn't even try to make a call. If this every happens to you (getting connected to the wrong network), or if you want to pick from among several suppliers when roaming, you can go to Phone Menu->Options->Select Network and make your choice.
Installation of the Palm Desktop software on Mac OS X was not so simple. This software connects with the standard Palm HotSync application in the Treo. Installation died due to a known issue with StuffIt that appears on the Palm site but is not in the README file that came with the Treo. Although Palm's site claim it is not needed on Panther, it seemed to be needed anyway, so I clicked the link from that page. When you get to Aladdin/StuffIt's web site, they blame Apple.
In the end, all this may not have been necessary. What really matters is that if you have iSync 1.2 installed, you also need the permissions fixer that undoes some little permissions glitch that is blamed on the iSync installer.
Once I got it installed, the desktop software ran fine, and has been running smoothly for about a month. On the Mac, it can synchronize entirely with Palm Desktop, or you can sync your contacts into Address Book and your calendar items into iCal.
Nobody ever reads the manuals that come with a cell phone, right? Well, the folks at Handspring recognize that, because the first page of the instruction manual begins, "If you read nothing else ..." and goes on to explain the basics. As a reviewer, I seldom read manuals, preferring to bumble through things and thereby get the same experience as the majority of my readers, who tell me they seldom read manuals.
Seriously, the manual seems pretty good, and is worth at least a quick glance. It will tell you how to avoid damaging your device, for example, and that's gotta be worth something on a device that's worth over $400.
What about the keyboard? Its form factor is even smaller than that of the Treo 180/270/300 it replaces. I found that typing on it is no worse, however. There is a shift key for upper case and an Option key for the numbers, punctuation, and other characters. You don't type on a handheld the same way you type on a laptop or desktop, of course. You work out some variations of two-thumbed and one-handed typing, depending on what your other hand may be doing and how important it is not to drop your Treo on the ground. The keyboard layout is different from the 180, and I find it improved -- more of the special characters that you need all the time are available. Of course, as you can see from the picture, the range of characters on the keyboard is still pretty limited. The Alt key produces a drop-down chooser of characters that are considered variations on the last key you typed. For example, typing Option, then W, gives a + sign; pressing Alt covers the + with a drop-down to let you choose + or &. It sounds a bit convoluted, but it works well in practice.
The keyboard is illuminated, so you can type at night. It's a bit hard to see some of the Option character markings in the dark. Heck, at my age, it's hard to see some of them in the daytime, without my reading glasses on. Just kidding, folks; you can see them all fine in daylight. The keyboard illumination cuts out after a minute to save battery life, but you can change the timeout setting in Preferences.
Above the keyboard are the usual four Palm buttons (configured by default for Phone, Calendar, Email, and Screen On/Off). In the middle of this row is the five-way navigator, which extends the traditional Palm Up and Down buttons with Right and Left, and a Center button that means Activate or Enter in most applications.
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What's really special about the Treo 600 is its integration. It combines a Palm device, a cell phone, a digital camera, and, optionally, an MP3 player. How well does the integration work? Can you really get rid of the double-sixgun geek look? The answer is ... yes! The Treo 180 proved that a workable Palm-and-cell-phone combination could be built, and I used one of those for a year or so. Treo 600 takes it a lot further: it combines Palm device, cell phone, camera, MP3 player, and more.
Taking pictures is easy. Run the Camera application (which you can get to from the Phone main screen just by pressing Right). Aim the device (the lens is on the back, and after thirty years of using regular cameras it did take a couple of tries to remember that you take pictures by looking at the screen, not through the non-existent viewfinder). And press the Center button to take the picture. By default the Camera app will ask if you want to save every image, but I found it easier to turn this off, and save every image by default. Ones I don't like I delete manually, either at leisure on the Treo or after uploading them to the desktop.
The camera takes reasonable pictures -- for a telephone. It won't replace a good digital camera. There's no flash or zoom, and it's preset to a fairly wide angle. What is unique is that you can email directly from the Treo, which I'll show an example of shortly.
Having a digital camera with you at all times can be a mixed blessing. It's very convenient to be able to snap a photo of a good idea you saw, or an advertisement you liked (or didn't). There is a potential for people to use camera phones in ways that are not appropriate. While millions of camera phones, camera PDAs and digital cameras have been sold, the camera phone -- with its ability to email pictures off-site -- has attracted the most attention. And in a move that worries civil libertarians, camera phones are increasingly being subject to restrictive legislation. Where would the Rodney King trial have been if, to take a really extreme example (but one that is in effect in some parts of the world), video cameras were banned in areas of police activity? There's clearly a lot of spectrum between a totalitarian ban on cameras in public, and a ban on tiny handheld phones being used inappropriately in washrooms and changing rooms. But it is a spectrum, not a discontinuity. The following appeared in the metro (a Toronto daily tabloid) on Thursday, February 19, 2004:
Curbs on Camera Phones
The city has banned camera phones from all locker rooms and washrooms at arenas, community centres, and recreation facilities.
"It's simply a precautionary move," said Brenda Librecz, general manager of Parks and Recreation. "It's not because we've had any incidents."
The city posted notices in all its facilities earlier this month, following similar moves elsewhere in Canada and the United States.
...Librecz said regular cell phones are still allowed, adding that it would be difficult to restrict their use.
The ban ... extends to cameras, video cameras, and PDAs ... that have photographic capability.
So aside from the politics, how well does the Treo 600 work as a camera phone?
Well, let's face it: it will never replace the HP620-class digital camera
for general photographic use.
It has auto-focus, but no zoom, and is preset to a fairly wide angle.
Think of it as a webcam-quality camera that travels with you for free
because it's in your phone. The other day I was driving home from town and
couldn't help but notice that
a neighbor's visitor had backed a bit too far out of the driveway,
so I took a snapshot of the car in the ditch.
Here is the original image (29KB).
The built-in Camera application displays images with a caption above and some
buttons below, reducing the size of the image. It is left to a third-party application
to provide full-screen display of JPEG images.
Editor Derrick Story found one called
RescoViewer.
(Here's guided tour from
the vendor's site.)
Here is a screenshot showing
RescoViewer's full-screen view of the "car in the ditch" photo
on my Treo 600.
The built-in software includes all of the standard Palm apps: a very powerful Calculator, Calendar, Contacts (which is mutated into Phone on Handspring cell phones), City Time, HotSync, Memo Pad, Prefs, and Security. These will be familiar to anyone who's used a Palm device. There are new wrinkles, such as desktop-style Color Themes in Preferences (which affect all applications), and more, but somebody who had learned to use an original PalmPilot would have no real issues in migrating to these apps.
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To this traditional Palm collection of built-ins, the Treo adds the Blazer Web Browser, Mail client, Camera Application, MMS and SMS and (GSM only) SIM-related apps. There's also Card Info for dealing with MultiMedia/SD cards (although called Card Info, it can reformat them if need be).
The Calendar app works as it has in previous Palm releases, featuring day, week, month, and year views. There are plenty of menu options as well, and the recurring options menu has been slightly improved. The program features fixed appointments, floating appointments, all day and no-time events, ToDo items, and even journal entries. Here's a few screen shots of Calendar in action.
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The Phone app is the heart of Treo's life as a cell phone.
When you press the Phone button, you see the Phone app's main screen.
It shows your carrier's name (if you're in coverage), signal strength, battery
condition, time and date, a phone dialer, and the actions for the directional
buttons, four of the five buttons in the
five-way navigator.
The default action for the Center button isn't labeled, but it pops
up a dial list that lets you show the Dial Pad (which is the same
as the main screen but without the five-way navigator buttons),
the Call Log, and a dozen or so of your most-recent calls.
Somebody at Handspring has obviously given a lot of thought to the
issue of how to optimize this, and it works well in practice.
All five settings, of course, can be changed in the Phone App's Preferences menu.
More proof of this optimization is found in a really nice feature of the Contacts view, called Quick Contacts. If you type a person's initials (ID for Ian Darwin), or type several letters of their name, Contacts will display only names that match. When you get it down to one name, pressing either Enter or the Center button will dial that person. So very few keystrokes are needed most of the time. Very optimized.
The favorites view gives you quick access to your most common action items.
They can be speed-dials such as voicemail, a friend's cell, or your home voice
mail.
They can be applications, such as Mail, the ToDo list or the web browser.
No distinction is made between built-in apps, such as Mail, and downloaded
apps, such as FileZ (which I'll discuss below).
An action item can even be a URL (such as Search), in which case the web browser
opens automatically. Just like a real desktop, almost.
HotSync, of course, synchronizes with your desktop. Windows and Mac provide Palm Desktop; on UNIX platforms you can use various open source packages that sync with Palm devices over USB. There are third-party options for synchronizing with office-suite documents; among the best known is Documents To Go. Others include QuickOffice (which also supports the Mac OS), and more. Your favorite search engine will find them for you.
Of course, all of the Treo's functionality does not come cheap. After paying a premium for the phone, you can also expect to pay for data services, which you need if you want to use email, web, or other Internet services. Rogers, for example, has an entry level plan for $25 Canadian (about $18 American) per month for 3MB of data - on top of your voice service. If you're visiting conventional web sites, it doesn't take long to go through 3MB of data transfer; you may want to turn off image downloading in Preferences. There were issues for the very-occasional user, but these have been resolved: if you don't take the data plan, you can now use the data services on a pay-as-you-go basis. They have other plans for heavier-duty users, of course. U.S. Carriers tend to charge about $20 extra for data, but give more megabytes; check your carrier's web site for their latest pricing information.
Once I got signed up for data service, things went pretty well. The Treo connected via GPRS on my very first try, and I sent a photograph from the camera application to my normal email account (see mail reading -- the Mac mail app shows image attachments inline; I hope they have no buffer overflows).
On a roll, I fired up the web browser. After downloading about 15KB,
it showed the palmOne portal nicely.
Note that that page is in HTML, not WML.
What sets the web browser in the Treo apart from the browsers in
cheaper phones is that Handspring's Blazer is a full HTML browser.
You can visit regular web sites, not just ones that are set up with WML
for the tiny little screens of the cheaper phones.
In fact, you can hit almost any site,
even one with non-life-threatening errors in its HTML.
Of course, Blazer also handles WML.
While it's not as functional as Mozilla, Safari, or Internet Explorer,
it provides a great browsing experience on the road.
Having created a simple WML page on my own site, I thought I'd visit that. So I went in the Browser's Go menu to the section where you can type an arbitrary URL to visit. I clicked to set the insertion point in the text field, and ... my Treo reset itself! Well, PalmOS isn't UNIX. Fatal application errors can still crash "the machine." The Treo reboots OK. Restart the browser, and it won't connect to the Internet. Now I started to sweat, thinking that somehow Rogers has done something to the protocol (my phone came direct from the USA). But then I notice that I have just walked into an area that doesn't have GPRS coverage. I tried again a bit later; it started up OK. Got ready to try again to visit my own site. Clicked in the URL typing area. Bang! Another instant reset. Fear started to set in. I went to Handspring's support pages. No reports like this! Then I Googled "treo 600 reset url" and, sure enough, the first hit was at Treo Central's Forum site. When all else fails, forget the manual -- Google it! The article at discuss.treocentral.com/forum/showthread.php?t=50970 explains that the predictive-typing cache for URLs gets corrupted occasionally. They provide a link to an open source utility, FileZ, and directions for how to delete the corrupted caches. After following these simple steps, the problem was solved. Well, we all know that a vendor's support pages never have the whole story. Once you've bought your Treo, you'll want to bookmark Treo Central for additional resources!
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With that out of the way, I went on to visit Sun.com; the left image shows the loading state and the right shows it fully loaded. Note the spinner and traffic volume indicator at the bottom of the loading image -- when you're surfing at GPRS speeds, you appreciate sites that keep their HTML lean and mean.
I also went to my own site (see left panel).
And then I went back to my WML site, which finally downloaded,
only to show the error message below, right.
Well, that's what can happen when you create WML in vi.
You might not want to try this at home, kids!
Table 2
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The browser does quite a good job at squashing images to display on the screen. The OpenBSD web site that I help maintain has an image that is about 220 by 600, and it displays quite nicely on the Treo.
One little annoyance about the browser is that I couldn't find a way to get it to display cached pages without connecting to the Internet. This bandwidth-saving addition would be welcomed by customers whose carriers charge exorbitantly for Internet access.
Of course, when people hear that you have an Internet phone, they want to talk about the Mail client. The built-in Mail supports most modern mail standards, although its download is limited to POP (there's no IMAP support; for that, you have to go with third-party software). As is typical of the inter-operability among the built-in applications, composing a new message lets you pick the recipients from your Contact list. And pressing Mail from the Camera application opens the Mail Compose window directly. While I wouldn't expect it to replace my desktop mail reader, I've found it perfectly usable for sending and receiving mail. To avoid hogging that expensive bandwidth it has a message size cap of 5KB, which, like almost everything else, is settable (see panels 2 and 3 below). The settings give you the usual amount of control over ingoing and outgoing messages (see panels 4-6).
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The Treo 600 has 32MB of RAM, of which 24MB is available to the user. Unless you're sharing one PDA between all the salespeople in your company, that really is enough to hold all of your contacts. And it will hold about 600 photos at the camera's maximum resolution of 640 by 480.
But it won't hold very many MP3 files.
Yes, MP3 files. This thing becomes an MP3 player with third-party software.
I use the one palmOne recommends,
Pocket Tunes
.
It's normally about $20, but is free if you buy a Treo 600 and register it online
(this may be a limited-time offer).
If you prefer your software from big blue companies, there is also a
RealAudio player (which also plays MP3), just in case the notion of streaming
RealAudio down to a Palm handheld excites you.
(Note that you must register to download and you must be located in
the U.S. in order to download; their web site "correctly" rejected me
when I tried to download it from Toronto.) And, they only support
Windows "at present," so do vote with your wallet -- elsewhere.
You can expand the Treo's memory using MMC or SD cards; I tested an 8MB MMC card and an 128MB SD card. One thing to beware of is counterfeit SD cards. palmOne claims that certain (they won't say which) "non-standard" SD cards can damage the SD slot in your Treo 600. And guess what? This damage is not covered by the warranty. So beware, and buy and use only SD cards that have an official SD logo.
With a bit of trepidation I took the Lexar 128MB SD card from my wife's HP620 and stuck it in the Treo. Which proceeded to lock up, requiring a soft reset. Fear. Reboot. Try it again. Lock up. But no damage to the Treo. Whew! I then stuck the SD card into my TiBook running 10.3.2, which also locked up! But only once; after that it was fine in the Mac, and the Treo! Go figure. Then I could download music and upload pictures.
In fact, memory cards turn out to be the only way I could upload pictures. In keeping with Palm's slow move away from Macs, despite the nice touchy-feely stuff, Palm does not provide Mac users with a conduit for uploading photos. (Given the rise of cam phones, this is an obvious candidate for either the iSync or iPhoto developers to take on; are you listening, Apple?) Mac users can back up their photos as one large PDB file using the default backup conduit in the Palm Desktop, then break them out with a tool like iTreo or ImageConverter. iTreo is cool: you can drag images from the preview it gives onto the desktop, the finder, a program like iPhoto, or directly into a graphics program. Alternately, put your images directly onto an SD card (in the Camera application, choose Move and select the Card at the bottom of the Categories list). Then plug the SD card into a reader/converter on your Mac, and use iPhoto to slurp them in. Of course, if you sync on Windows, you can use the HotSync photo conduit that they provide.
MMC cards can contain applications;
the one card I picked up was the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
My Anglo-background family has always had a leaning to the Britannica,
which originated as a three-volume set in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1768
(although it's now American-owned and -operated).
And it helps that the user interface to Britannica's
desktop computer edition was
written largely in my favorite programming language, Java.
When I heard it was available for my Treo, I said "No way!"
But here it is,
Britannica in Palm edition, in an MMC card
(as a cute little touch, it comes with a plastic case for holding
up to six MMC/SD cards, one of which is the all-plastic dust-protector/dummy
that you keep in the phone when no card is in use).
Slide the Britannica MMC card into the slot, and you have a cell phone with
an encyclopaedia inside!
Of course it's not the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica;
this has only 24,000 or so of the most commonly consulted entries.
And it doesn't seem to have a full-text search; I could only find a
"search by article title" function.
But sure enough, if you look up, say, Java, you get this (see figure):
.
While the vendor doesn't officially support the Treo 600, it worked fine
(again, I had a moment's trepidation before inserting it, but I figured
it was at least from a reputable source).
It does work. I must say that having a cell phone with
Britannica inside is just sooo cool.
And yes, having this card in my cell phone actually does make me
a walking encyclopaedia.
If you like the encyclopaedia, you might also want The Oxford American Desk Dictionary and Thesaurus for Palm OS by Handmark, or other dictionaries from palm-dictionaries.com.
Software in MMC cards is just software loaded into a RAM card.
Many titles are not read-only or otherwise protected,
so you could, in theory, copy them. But you also have to be careful;
the instructions with my Britannica card actually remind you that you can
render the encyclopaedia "inoperative" by formatting the memory card, just in case you wondered what would happen. Don't.
In fact, Card Info identifies the Britannica's hardware as a perfectly ordinary
32MB Hitachi Multimedia Card.
But something must have interfered slightly with some data on the card,
because after about two weeks, it got confused and started asking for a
serial number out of the blue!
What's even stranger is that it stopped this silly prompting again,
with no more reason than it had for starting.
Of course, most Palm software is downloaded or sold on CD. Another package I find useful in a Palm device is printing, for which I use good old PalmPrint, from Stevens Creek Software. PalmPrint worked fine printing via IRDA from my Treo 600 to my HP LaserJet with IR support.
After getting the web browser working, I decided I needed to show you how the web pages actually look. Google found a variety of programs that claimed to do screen-dumps on the Palm. After a false start and lots of pop-ups from TealPrint, I settled on ScreenShot from LinkeSoft GmbH. The results are the picture-perfect screen shots you see here.
And you did hear me mention Java. There is a fast IBM Java Virtual Machine that you can purchase from Palm's site or from handango.com. Why do they charge $5.99 extra for the JVM when you've paid hundreds of dollars for the phone? I do not know, but I guess they have to draw the line somewhere. (By contrast, many other vendors' phones bundle the J2ME runtime.) There is, however, a palmOne page specifically for Java developers.
Also in my list of applications,
you'll see the schedule programs from
AirCanada and ViaRail (strangely called e.Schedule), typical of what most
large travel companies provide.
I have previously used these on my Treo 180 and had no
problems with using them on the 600, other than that the navigator
arrows don't work as well here as they do in newer applications.
My Treo 180 got about two days of standby time; the 600 claims to get up to 10 days. Of course there is no exact figure on battery life. Palm's literature says "6 hours talk time, 10 days standby." Elsewhere it says "240 hours standby," making clear they mean ten days of 24 hours, not just ten work days. But even standby time is determined by how far you are from the cell tower -- the further away from one you are, the louder your phone has to shout to be heard by the tower, and it does this even when you're not in a conversation, of course, so that the carrier's network will know to which cell tower to route your incoming calls.
Of course, expansion cards shorten your battery life, as they draw power from the Treo.
The claim of 10 days of standby time, with no expansion card, is certainly achievable and believable. I usually synchronize every day or two, and that puts a bit of juice into the battery, but for several weeks I didn't have the machine shut down due to low battery. I did get the red line warning appear in the battery; see below. The FileZ utility mentioned above has a screen for showing battery life, but its calibration is a bit off, as the phone kept going and going like a certain well-known energetic bunny, even when the battery gauge got to zero (see the third panel below).
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But eventually the battery must really run out. What happens then? Does the Palm keep your data safe? Since this is a review, I wanted to find out for you. I was reluctant to try it in case it lost all of my data, but that's what backups (HotSync) are for. So I let it run right down, and the phone eventually stopped, doing a graceful shutdown (see bottom-right panel). Totally dead, like you'd expect a phone with a dead battery. Except it's not really dead at this point; it has carefully kept enough power in reserve to keep the contents of memory intact for a couple of days. When I connected the phone to the charger several hours later, it came right back on with no loss of data; all of my settings, recent appointments, and so on were all intact. Palm claims this is a feature, and is it ever a good one! As far as I'm concerned, you should have no qualms about trusting a Treo with your data. Of course, in normal life there's no reason to let the battery go this low. If you hot-sync every day or two and leave the phone connected to the charging cable for an hour or so, it will not go below about 70% battery charge. The phone does give you plenty of warning that it's getting low. It's nice to know, though, that if you really need to go low, you can, once in a while.
Speaking of cables, the cables are compatible with those from the Treo 180/270/300 series, so you can use your existing USB cables (but not the chargers, because of the phone's narrower but slightly deeper profile).
The Treo 600 represents a major engineering effort, and it would be surprising (and you would, I hope, be suspicious) if I didn't find at least a few glitches. So here they are.
Actually, that's a pretty short list. I've been living with the Treo 600 for almost a month so far, and that's really all I've found to object to. I really like the Treo 600.
The Treo 600 is Handspring's "third system" when it comes to building a cell-phone-plus-PDA combination, the first being the VisorPhone and the second being the 180/270/300 series. They say (in software development, at least) that you throw away your first system because it's too limited and your second because it gets too big, and your third is supposed to be about right. It didn't work for Windows 3.1, but it sure worked for Handspring on the Treo 600. I like my Treo 600. I'm keeping it. Handspring: You're not getting it back!
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