Palm Treo/Blackberry/WM/smartphones: discuss

[BTB123]

I've decided to waste some money and get a phone that I can do my emailing rather than just play Snake like on my current ancient pay as you go.

I trotted down to Carphone Warehose and spoke to two sales assistants who didnt seem to know even how things like blackberrys work. ahem.

I'm just looking for a phone that I can pull down/reply to emails from my pop3 accounts and open the odd excel or word attachment. Nothing too fancy and on a cheapish tarrif. Plus a qwerty keyboard would be an advantage as most my email traffic are little back and forth converations.

Any ideas?
Ta

 

[scott_forester]

If you want to do word etc I guess you'll need a windows mobile phone. None of them are cheap - and charge on bandwidth for downloads etc so fat attachments could be expensive. I know one guy that uses MSN on this sony phone all the time, painful.

 

[editor]

I'd go for the Palm Treo - it's a lovely smartphone that almost always comes out top in usability tests.

Otherwise, you can get something like the imate JAM phone/MDACompact phones that run on Windows.

 

[El Jugador]

pinkmonkey posting

i've got a blackberry - it's easy to use, no frills and cheap. Never crashed, battery lasts ages, never not any access, but absoultely not flashy or techy - which I like TBH. I'm v. impressed. Blackberry phones reduce the size of attachments before they send them to your handset - eg. a 200k file suddenly becomes 4k. This is important to me because I work abroad alot. Without this the bills would be very high indeed.

 

[Piers Gibbon]

my treo 650 rocks on email and everything

it comes with docs to go so you can read attachments

it has an option to not download attachments..and then choose to download them if they look interesting later..or truncate them (but not some kind of autocompress thing as mentioned above for blackberry - tell me more i'm jealous)

loving it...getting real work done on trains and stuff

downloaded a free programme called tcpmp and can listen to mp3's and even watch movies ffs (you need a card to get serious with that)

even the camera has been actually useable..the last few entries on my newsblog are adorned with treosnaps

http://www.piersgibbon.com/news/

Now I have not read the useability studies - the editor knows his onions on that better than anyone else on the planet - but for me as a long term palm user with a mac it was a no brainer...which is why I dithered for ages about getting one

palm rocks...treo 650 yeeha

 

[editor]

I wish I'd stuck with Palm, but - there again - the WiFi on my imate JAM has come in useful.

But the Palm platform is simply far more usable for everyday tasks than Windows Mobile, and the hardware keyboard on the Treo is about a zillion times better than the 'virtual' one on some devices.

And don't get me started on the camera on my JAM. What a bag'o'shite that is!

 

[Xanadu]

I think I've been using what tcpmp was derived from, betaplayer. Lovely player, does ogg and everything! Got a 512mb minisd card which does the job. btw, IIRC windows smartphones don't actually read word and excel files, you need pocket pc. at least my windows smartphone doesn't read word or excel files.

 

[Piers Gibbon]

I wish I'd stuck with Palm, but - there again - the WiFi on my imate JAM has come in useful.

But the Palm platform is simply far more usable for everyday tasks than Windows Mobile, and the hardware keyboard on the Treo is about a zillion times better than the 'virtual' one on some devices.

And don't get me started on the camera on my JAM. What a bag'o'shite that is!

wifi..is there some conspiracy theory as to why we can't have wifi on the treo 650? its obviously technically feasible as there is a sledthingy that adds wifi to the 650...and its available on all sorts of other phones

yup Palm is definitely an everday useful thing..it has rapidly made itself even more essential to me than the treo 270 before it

maybe I big up the camera too much..seriously I don't know, you tell me - the recent snaps on my newspage look fine to me and I just love the fact that I am gauranteed to have the camera with me at all times - and the photos then don't need any shrinking to go straight on the web

and presumably if i get really clever I could even upload them to the web directly from the phone..but I'm scared of the phone bill if I do so I'm not gonna go there

 

[editor]

and presumably if i get really clever I could even upload them to the web directly from the phone..but I'm scared of the phone bill if I do so I'm not gonna go there

It's not hard. I used to blog directly from my Palm by snapping the pics with my Clie PDA, updating the text on my Blog with the Mo:Blog app (I designed the graphics for that!) and then uploading the pics by FTP to my site (there's a free prog for that) and that was it!

Splash also do a neat photo blogging tool, but it only uploads to their space.
http://www.splashdata.com/

 

[Radar]

Palm Info Center are reporting rumours of a palm OS treo 700 for April release, unfortuately no Cobalt(palmos 6) on the cards

Might be worth waiting until nearer that time as a new 700 is bound to pull the 650 prices down. My cousin has the 650 and swears by it. I had a quick play with it down the pub one night, I'm too much of a graffiti fan to be able to live without writing on screen instead of that keyboard (surprisingly good that it is even without stylus indents on the individual keys ). No wifi on the 650 is a pisser too unless you're made of money and have GPRS paid for by someone else.

My own personal setup is a standard Tungsten T3 but with a new 20% higher capasity internal battery off ebay, the Palm Wifi card and a Socket Mobile Power Pack/USB cable. I use a SD -> CF converter in my Fiju s602 so I can view its images on the palm at 320*480 just by moving the SD card between the palm and camera.

Palm's WiFi card and/or drivers don't support all 13 EU WiFi channels, they only allow the 11 US ones. Tweaking the WiFi start channel on your access point can fix this at home, but it's more of a problem when you're roaming on this side of the pond

All in all I'm well happy with the T3 now that WiFi works and the battery life is manageable. I won't be moving until a decent Cobalt based sucessor with superior hardware appears.

 

[Piers Gibbon]

hey radar I use Graffiti Anywhere on the treo 650 - no probs there!

and editor that mo:blog looks great, thanks...am about to change my blogging software so I'll try and make sure it's compatible with mo:blog

 

[Radar]

hey radar I use Graffiti Anywhere on the treo 650 - no probs there!

Oooh Oooh, have to give that a try the next time I get my sweaty mitts on a 650. With grafitti working too, the 650 looks as good as it gets (obviously sans cobalt)

 

[BTB123]

Cheers for all the tips. It's the tarifs that are overloading my brain now . It's all about picking GPRS download bundles - how much in peoples experience do you need?

Also, is that ussually the only charge or their hidden other bits and bobs?


Ta

 

[BTB123]

A bit off subject, but has anyone dealt with fones4free.com - their prices seem too good to be true

 

[Piers Gibbon]

tariffs are the devils own mystery

i'm on a business 300 vodafone and am always under on mins..they rollover one month only

I added a 6 quid bundle of mixed text+data and have always been under on that too

have only been on this for three months so its early days and so far no nasty surprises...and they gave me a treo 650 "free" as long as im signed up for a year so I'm happy at the mo

 

[oicur0t]

Liberty and I have found that our windows mobile based phones, while have a vast array of software are just too unreliable. They both crash all the time and can be soooo slow (orange M500's - virtually the same as Editor's) But they were cheap and on a good tariff...and all my data bills are paid for by my employer. I've also just built an IMAP server and it integrates fine with that, in and out of the office.

 

[Kid_Eternity]

I've got this, brilliant little phone but slightly slow CPU. The slide out keyboard is the best i've ever used (and it's backlight with a cool O2 blue hue!), sending and recieving email is a pieces of piss as is syncing with outlook etc. More importantly it's got wifi built in (no faffing about with ugly bits of plastic that stick out of the sd slot), bluetooth 2.0 and comes bundled with a decent pdf viewer and nicely zipping software too. It's free on O2.

 

[Crispy]

I've got this

Ah yes - no major hassles then? Fits in your pocket? Makes phone calls and texts reliably like a normal phone? I'm about to take the plunge now. Got my PAC and everything

 

[editor]

Built in wi-fi is a real bonus. But is the processor powerful enough to run Skype?

 

[Kid_Eternity]

Built in wi-fi is a real bonus. But is the processor powerful enough to run Skype?

Haven't tried, not sure it can although to be fair Skype are working on various versions optimised for sub 400mhz cpu phones (which things like the P900 series and the Mini S fall into)...when they're released i'll download and give some feedback.

 

[Kid_Eternity]

Ah yes - no major hassles then? Fits in your pocket? Makes phone calls and texts reliably like a normal phone? I'm about to take the plunge now. Got my PAC and everything

I'll be honest and say it aint perfect; it is a bit slow and sometimes needs to be shut down completley and rebooted.* The form factor is perfect though, it's really the best balance between normal sized phone and pda I've seen (with a great screen!). Everything runs fairly well on it and trust me once you've typed with the keyboard you cannot go back to crappy t9 or cycling through characters to form words!

*I've heard there's some firmware update coming for this in the next couple of months...

 

[WWWeed]

If I was you I'd wait for the HTC Prophet/M600, only problem is it has a 200Mhz cpu and cant run skype.

I want to upgrade my M2000 to one, orange recon its gonna be out by march...

specs are:

supports Bluetooth 2.0 connectivity and built-in Wi-Fi capabilities (802.11b/g). Regardless of the fact that it only measures 108 x 58 x 18 mm and weighs 148 grams, SPV M600 features a 2 megapixel camera, an SDIO-enabled SD/MMC card expansion slot, a 200 MHz processor, 64 MB of RAM and 128 MB of ROM memory

 

[BTB123]

Cheers again

My brain is positively humming with the choice of tariffs, why can't these things be simpler?

 

[Piers Gibbon]

trust me once you've typed with the keyboard you cannot go back to crappy t9 or cycling through characters to form words!
.

aint that the truth

I now cannot text on a normal phone..just no way

and I think my friends find it weird and irritating that i send chatty multi-point full spelling texts to which they can only answer.."CU Yeah god idea xx"

 

[Kid_Eternity]

LOL! Yeah, it's true although it's cost me a small fortune in texting in the first month because I kept writing properly rather than text speak which meant sending two to three texts instead of one. Not cheap when you're paying 12p a text!

 

[Kid_Eternity]

Oooh this is the first time I've been tempted by a Crackberry! Check out the new 8700!

 

[pinkmonkey]

Oooh this is the first time I've been tempted but a Crackberry! Check out the new 8700!

It's good innit? What I like most about them is they are so reliable - they don't crash, the battery lasts all week and they don't cost so much to run. I'm addicted to mine. I do wish I'd waited for the new one though - my next free upgrade is a few months away now.

 

[Kid_Eternity]

It's good innit? What I like most about them is they are so reliable - they don't crash, the battery lasts all week and they don't cost so much to run. I'm addicted to mine. I do wish I'd waited for the new one though - my next free upgrade is a few months away now.

Cool little device that lacks two (for me anyway) important elements: a touch screen but most importantly built in wifi. I could live without the touch screen but no wifi=no deal as far as I’m concerned.

 

[editor]

Oooh this is the first time I've been tempted but a Crackberry! Check out the new 8700!

Where's the Wi-Fi?

If you can live without WiFi you may as well get the Palm Treo which has infinitely more software on offer.

 

[Kid_Eternity]

Where's the Wi-Fi?

If you can live without WiFi you may as well get the Palm Treo which has infinitely more software on offer.

Doesn’t have it, thought it did at first ( ) but yeah it’s my minimum requirement these days for such a device….