Treo 600: Not Your Parents' PalmPilot
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All Together

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.

Built-in Software

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.

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.

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.

It's the Web, Stupid

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!

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

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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