tonyballinger.com

When I came into work on Friday, I had an early surprise xmas present waiting for me: an orange Treo 680. Carolyn (my boss) knows my love for gadgets, and I had been mentioning that the 680 was coming out for a while now. But I was thinking more of a replacement for her thoroughly abused Treo 600, than a new gadget for myself.

It’s been a while since I’ve used a Palm Pilot. I had a Palm V for a long while, and then upgraded to a 505 for the color screen. But after a while, my cell phones did enough calendaring that I didn’t feel the need to carry another gadget. The one exception was when on vacations, when I would load up the city’s information into Vindigo for the trip.

But this is no Palm 505. This thing is a wildly versatile device – decent phone capabilities (including a speakerphone), a great e-mail client, a very useful web browser and a calendar better than any phone’s. It also has a camera (with video capture), a voice recorder and an mp3 player. It can also edit Word and Excel documents. It also has Bluetooth for communicating with my mac and other devices wirelessly.

The thing is a digital swiss army knife.

Getting the phone up and running with T-Mobile was as easy as swapping out the SIM card from my Motorola ROKR. After purchasing and running The Missing Sync, I had my address book transferred to the Treo. Things didn’t get complicated until the next day, when I started installing old Palm games on the Treo. This is not a good idea. In general, I’m avoiding installing anything now that hasn’t at least been tested and gotten good reviews for stability on the Treo 600 or 650. A few old games I enjoyed on the 505 resulted in a endless loop of crashing and restarting the phone.

But that’s all behind me now. I’ve installed a few (safe) games, a couple of mp3 players and a handful of other useful utilities. I’ve been surfing the web, sending and receiving text messages, listening to music and of course, making phone calls for about a week now. Once I’ve had a bit more experience with the gadget, I’ll post a few reviews of mp3 players for the device.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 21st, 2006 at 10:46 am and is filed under Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.