February 15, 2005
Some observations (and to dos) from my first trip with my new Treo 650:
EDGE: Philly clearly does not have EDGE. The Treo 650’s internet is twice as fast as the old 600 in Philadelphia at 56kbit/sec, but it’s going to get even faster when EDGE rolls out. On the Roger’s Wireless EDGE network in Quebec I consistently had transfer speeds of well over 125 kbit/sec (6.804s latency). The speed was amazing. Pages in the tiny Blazer browser loaded in the blink of an eye.
Bandwidth: With that kind of speed, bandwidth gets gobbled up fast. You have to have the Cingular unlimited bandwidth plan for an extra $19.95/month. I’ve also decided that I need to build a set of low bandwidth templates for Movable Type on Studio2f. The site needs to poll the browser on the way in and serve up a thin version of the content. When I do a cellphone/Treo blog post, I check to the site to see if the entry published correctly— because loss of the GPRS signal or network glitch while uploading and the image gets corrupted. As it is now, this page can have over 600k on it. A slimmed down version coming in under 50k would be prefect.
MoPho: This weekend the free MFop went down and that stopped me from being able to post live cellphone pictures from Carnival. It was bummer. I can’t bitch, because MFop is a wonderful FREE service, but I think I need to revisit how I mobile blog. The current Treo blogging apps are too buggy— and I can’t find one that can successfully upload an image. With the aid of Dunc-IT, I going to roll my own mail-to blog posting system.
Security: Movable Type’s basic setup uses unencrypted clear-text passwords. That scares me on untrusted networks. The home-rolled mail-to MFop style blogging solution is going to receive Mo-Phos on one of our servers and post the MT entry over the VPN that connects to Studio2f. Likewise I’m going to start SSH tunneling all logins.
DUN: I have to get the bluetooth dial-up-networking hack working on the Treo. The EDGE connection in Quebec proved that DUN is going to rock, and will be a viable, useful network connection ANYWHERE. Aside from working on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, I’d much rather post images from my Nikon D100 than from the Treo’s camera.
Camera: The contrast sucks. The Treo’s camera takes decent pics for a crappy cellphone cam, but they’re always washed out. There must be a hack like Qset that can kick the contrast up a notch.
I just received my unlocked GSM here yesterday. It's a pretty impressive device. The interface isn't as bad as I remember, but it's not fantastic. I'm impressed that I was able to listen to an audio file and be in another app. I'm curious if all applications are able to work in the background. When I track down a good FTP client, it would be nice for the connection to remain open while I edit the file, since the bandwidth is all you can eat.
I'm on T-Mobile here and still stuck in GPRS land. I had their base internet package for $9.99 and with that you can only get email on the Treo, so I moved to their $19.99 plan. Speed is okay, much better than the T610 though. Just that Blazer can render the webpages is impressive enough.
I bought MissingSync, thanks. I did install Palm initially, but I just wound up hard reseting and starting over. I was able to use my Bluetooth connection on the phone so I could surf through my laptop. Not as ideal as a WiFi solution (cause you need that bridge) but still faster than GPRS. Perhaps you can work with Dunc-IT to get a functional WiFi driver going :D
MissingSync though, doesn't seem to be the solution I hoped it would be. I had to dance a bit in order to get it to sync and for it to mount my SD card, but once it was working it was great. I'm also disppointed that it doesn't pull the Photos from my Address Book. This seems like something that should be pretty simple to sync, and I don't know why it's not there. Of course it didn't happen with my T610, so it probably is an Apple issue.
Which brings me to something else I'm missing. With the T610 you were able to use Apple's built in tools to Send and Recieve files from the phone, something which isn't supported yet (if ever) with this phone. It would be great to simply upload one file, instead of having to go through the sync process.
I was thinking of switching to flickr.com for my Mophoto needs. I've signed up as a pro user, so it's just an additional free service where you can just email them and they'll flickr it and post it on your MT blog.
You may also want to check out this thread (http://discussion.treocentral.com/showthread.php?t=71067), seems we're entitled to a free 128MB SD card through Palm. Trying to make up for the Treos small built in ram size.
And I have DUN enabled by default. :)
Oh, I also received my credit for my Callwave for your Free iPod mini, a few weeks after I signed up.
Yeah, mac integration isn't prefect. I really miss the BluePhoneElite menu item. IT sees the treo, but doesn't seem to know what to do with it.
With missing sync you get a free (demo?) version of splashphoto that is the only way to get you photos easily off the treo and onto your mac.
DUN... I'm going to do the shadowmite patch this week.
I'd like to know what you have found as must have apps... I'm going to list mine in a few days in a post. At the moment- I can't live without Chatter for email. Versamail didn't cut it.
I can't say that I've built a stable of applications just yet. MissingSync is great and I love being able to sync over bluetooth and their latest beta fixes a bug that was plaguing me.
Versamail is starting to fall me. I tried looking into Chatter just now and there website frustrated me to the point of nausea, so I'm not sure if thats right for me. My day job and a freelance job both use Exchange Servers and I'd love to be able to use them, but Versamail (maybe this is something I can't control) wont let me turn off the Calendar sync option, which replaces my Palm calendar with the Exchange one, which I really don't like.
I've been using VeriChat for IMing, which is great, but they have a yearly subscription which just seems wrong.
I downloaded Vindego which is good to use again after many years, I just wish it had more online features with it, it seems like they've barely advanced it.
KB Lights, turns off the backlight keyboard when you want it too is very useful.
pssh for sshing, although the author makes no claims for its security, but it seems better than the other ssh app out there.
Still using RealPlayer for Audio, but may look into pTunes a bit more.
I also may purchase the Atari Retro, but its stuck with the 7 games that are pre-loaded, and it is unfortuante that it doesn't allow additional games.
I was going to get Z Launcher, but I'm not sure if I really want the bloat.
EzFTP for FTPing, but I haven't used it a whole lot since my 1G card hasn't arrived yet.
The one thing that annoys me about the Treo is that yes there are all these advanced capabilities, but there are many basic features, features that you get with a free phone, that are missing. Like Voice Dialing. Yea, I can install some third party app and drop down some cash for it, but it seems like you have to drop alot of that to get it up to base level standards. Hell, it took me days before I found the call log and the redial menu.
I want to do a chart comparing a free phone to the treo. Coming from the T610, it seems like alot of simple things are missing.