Dennis Bareis' 2 Cents Worth: Hated my Nokia 6230, Love my New Palm TREO 650

Hi,

My first phone was a Nokia and it was simple but I loved it. I had since had two other non-Nokia phones which were OK but had a few "features". Since my first Nokia phone was so reliable (and without bugs) I decided a couple of years ago to replace my phone with the Nokia 6230.

For quite a few weeks after I first bought the 6230 I was a literally finding one or more bugs a day!

The Nokia "PC SUITE" desktop software has not had any less bugs and has never reliably worked (at least with bluetooth), frequently requiring reboots to recover. The latest version even refused to see my phone contacts at all! Support is non-existent (they don't reply - except for the "we will reply within 48 hour" response).

The PalmOS based TREO 650 smartphone has a number of things I don't like "out of the box" but I have eliminated or worked around these with some freely available software (freeware or open source) , some good links to start you off are:

http://www.freeware-palm.com/
http://www.palmopensource.com/
http://mytreo.net/downloads/cat1.html (freeware + shareware)
http://www.freewarepalm.com/ (lookout for popups...)

See "http://dennis2centsworth.blogspot.com/2007/01/dennis-list-of-must-have-applications.html" for some lists of "must have" applications.

The camera is poor by todays standards but this doesn't really worry me as you need a "real camera" for decent photography no matter what phone you have.

The SYNC to the desktop works well and since I to syncronise to the PALM DESKTOP I don't have to worry about things going wrong (for example I don't want to sync with outlook - I use the better "Thunderbird" in any case) and I also want to know what it is doing so I can be sure I've backed up everything I need to. It correctly categorises my contacts and never includes stuff I don't want.

The palm desktop is still a 16 bit application ! It also needs some modernising and appears to have been negected... It needs multimedia and extended backup options, other appications such as Adobe Reader need to integrate better.

I bought the 650 because I found it dirt cheap (nearly half the price of the closest competition) otherwise I'd either have bought the newer TREO 680 or waited for a decent smartphone with GPS and mapping software (which I'd really like - they are available but "need more work")...

Well I intend to keep this phone for at least 2 years and by then GPS has probably become "main stream" (the right time to put my toe in). I would prefer that my next phone to be a PalmOS based phone and now have good reason to be confident that it could be (http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3647801).

Some forums I've found: