Treo no hero
After a decade of using Palm-powered PDAs, I finally gave up the ghost and bought...a Crackberry. Even though I've been making fun of them for years, Blackberrys make the most sense for my needs right now. What I'd been looking for was a GSM world phone that synced calenders and got email. That's it. Oh yeah, and it can't crash every five minutes, forcing me to juggle a Treo with my hands full, open a battery compartment and stick a stylus into a little hole to reboot the "phone." And sometimes my Treo 650 randomly called people, usually at inappropriate moments. When I heard my son's voice coming out of my pant's pocket once, I had hit my limit.
Treos really do suck. Yet at one point they were the "it" device. Every CEO wannabe had one. Many of us spent serious time learning graffiti just to show everyone at work how cool we were, like college kids mastering chopsticks to impress a date.
So Robotics sold out to Palm. Palm dropped graffiti (effectively) from the high end products and then competed with smartphone companies like Samsung and Blackberry by adding broken features. Buying a Treo these days is disappointing, especially for former fans of the product line.
The blogs are full of complaints with both the 600 and the 650 and I'm sure that the 700 is no better. The weird problems are legendary: crashing several times a day, memory leaks that kill the system and phones that sound like you're making a ransom call using an electronic voice changer.
The problems with the product line are threefold:
- The operating system releases are buggy and unstable
- The hardware shell always seem to have glaring usability problems
- They've never been great-sounding phones
As a long-time supporter of Treos, I'm disappointed at how they've turned out. Oh by the way, the tech support is virtually useless since they will blame the phone provider under almost every cirumstance. "My treo just caught on fire!" "Is it Verizon? We've gotten a few of those today."
Posted on September 21, 2006
