Treo 650 Delights and Disappoints

Posted on September 16th, 2005

I’ve been using a Treo 650 for more than several months now. Overall I adore it. It represents a near perfect combination of mobile computing and communication. Not the best marriage of those two qaulities, but a good compromise. However, during this time I have seen the best and worst this little gadget has to offer, and its worst aspect has a name; Garnet.

PalmOS Garnet is so wickedly unstable it has become a liability. For the past two weeks my Treo spontaneously resets itself while sitting idle. I can be walking around and suddenly I hear the unmistakable phone activation chime emanating from my pocket. Yep, Garnet crashed again. Other times the device will inexplicably freeze up on me while I’m in the middle of something. It just freezes. You can’t even shut the damn thing off. Which means I have to pop the battery cover off, poke the reset button, and wait for my Treo to regain consciousness.

Earlier in the week I decided to switch the Treo over from my Mac to the PC as its primary sync host. Naturally I did a hard reset, made sure the old PalmOne directories were gone in Windows so as not to infect the Treo with legacy applications and data files. Everything went perfect. Then after several uses of VersaMail, it suddenly lost all my account settings after yet another crash. Gone! Even after setting my email account profiles back up, VersaMail will no longer connect with the GPRS network, it doesn’t even try. Immediately when you tap on the “Get” button an Alert message appears saying “Unable to establish PPP connection”. *Sigh* I could switch to SnapperMail, but why should I spend $30 or more to replace a flawed feature in a $600 Smartphone? It’s inexcusable.

I don’t blame Palm for this (except VersaMail). They have done a great job with the hardware aspect. Unfortunately they are at the mercy of the OS. As such, it’s no surprise Palm is readying a Windows Mobile Treo. In fact, I expect further devices supporting that OS coming from Palm next year. They have to, not only in order to stay competitive, but to stay in business! Garnet is doing to Palm what it does to my Treo.

The Treo 650 is so unreliable (thanks to Garnet) that I eagerly await the arrival of Windows Mobile to Palm’s Treo line. There are a lot of things I strongly dislike about Windows Mobile (which is why I tend to favor PalmOS over that solution), but honestly, PalmOS is now so unstable I no longer consider it to be a trustworthy mobile computing environment. And Windows Mobile 5 looks ever more compelling. At least I don’t worry about replacing the bloody Inbox.