Some things get better with time and other things just get worse. I used to be a huge Palm fan since about 1998 when I owned my first Palm IIIe. I was a hardcore Palm OS user; starting from the Palm IIIe, Palm V, 2 Sony Clie N760’s and the Sony Clie UX50. But the last product I have owned for two years is the Palm Treo 700w, which I loved when I first bought it. I loved it so much that I posted a raving review on this long awaited machine on CNET.
http://reviews.cnet.com/smart-phones/palm-treo-700w-gray/4864-6452_7-31473222.html?ctype=msgid&messageSiteID=7&messageID=1747344&cval=1747344&tag=uolstTwo years later I am on the verge of chucking this phone out of the second floor balcony window. It is interesting to see how a phone performs over time and I must say that this phone does not stand the test of time.
History 700 About a year of owning this machine the machine began to crawl. I have a 1GB SD card and plenty of space on the hard drive. (This was confirmed by the support folks at Verizon as well.) The machine was slow to react to the menu; once an item is selected for example ‘Messages,’ it would just hang and eventually load the page. Here are some of the issues I noticed in detail.
Always Checking E-mail and Nuking My Calls
I have programmed 3 e-mail accounts on my phone set to get mail every 15 minutes. One would think that e-mail is checked on all accounts and when you need to read mail it will all be there. This is NOT the case. The device is always checking e-mail and no mail is retrieved unless you do a forced Stop Send/Receive and then click Send/Receive again; even this process has a 50/50 success rate. Sometimes mail will be gotten sometimes it won’t. Also the device only gets e-mail on the account you have highlighted in the messages folder, the rest of your mails aren’t picked up unless you force it. The device will be retrieving mail and a minute later retrieving mail again. Also data takes priority so calls often will not interrupt the data feed and your callers will go straight to voicemail. This is very frustrating as I run a Real Estate business and I depend on this phone to manage my e-mail when I am not in front of a computer.
Frequent Reboots It is not clear to me if there is a memory leak with Windows Mobile or if it is the lack of hardware Palm put on this phone, but I have to reboot this phone 4 times a day. I usually tap the red hang-up key and there is no response which means the phone just died. I don’t know how many calls I would have missed in that time period. I’ve heard of a person who drilled a hole into the back case to get to the reset button. Grabbing the pen is too much work I just yank the battery.
Install the Patch Then! So in theory a phone that worked great for a year without any syncing or buggy patches should be working great, wrong again. It wasn’t until the 1.5 year mark that I finally got my device to sync. The challenge that I was facing was moving all my data from my old Palm OS to Windows Mobile. You would figure you’d get a CD to do this migration when this phone came out for being a loyal Palm user. Wrong! I have been trying the manual way so that I could avoid paying $20 some odd dollars for software that I would use only once. I gave up and bought the software to move my contacts to Outlook and finally synced all of this to my phone. I then tried the most recent patch with the sync which I hoped would fix all of my problems. I installed the patch, ran it and at reboot an error message pops up every time now. Each time I try to Active Sync it pretty much just times out. So patch? Been there tried that.
Blackberry vs. Palm 
I got a Blackberry 8700 for work and I didn’t think much of this device because it did not have the touch screen. But boy in comparison the Blackberry 8700’s e-mail system is much faster and I never miss any calls. Surprisingly the jog dial they have works quite well! Now with features such as GTalk for the Blackberry this is quite a nice device! I don’t have Verizon’s phone quality on Cingular however, which is why my personal phone stays on CDMA.
I’m All Out of Love I have given up now. I need my phone to do only a few things; store my contacts, clear connections to calls, check a few e-mail accounts and occasional quick web surfing. This phone is simply not doing any of these functions anymore. A partner company has their whole company on Treo’s and is trying out the Motorola Q. Since my refresh is coming up I don’t think I’ll be trying out anymore Treo’s. I feel that the Palm OS has had its day and the new designs don’t look sleek at all. This is a milestone in my life, 11 years of Palm hardware and this is goodbye to what was a great run of products. All good things must come to an end.
The final episode is also posted here:
http://reviews.cnet.com/smart-phones/palm-treo-700w-gray/4864-6452_7-31473222.html?messageSiteID=7&messageID=2497094&tag=uolst&cval=2497094&ctype=msgid
Every broadcaster has been saying that the Niners will “only get better” after their loss to Pittsburgh. I think that statement was spoken as a hope rather than with any factual data to support it. The Niners performance today was beyond horrible it was pathetic. On the first play of the game the offensive line misses a defensive end coming right up the middle which resulted in an injury to Alex Smith on the first play of the game; he did not come back to the game. I know it’s hard for any backup to come in when he didn’t expect to play, but I’ve always liked Trent and his fire for the game.
