Still enjoying my Treo 650… if only I could take it to work it would be absolutely perfect, but, oh well, next job I guess.
In the world of PDA (or PDA-like) phones I have owned a Sidekick, a PocketPC phone (T-Mobile MDA) and now the Treo 650. I liked the Sidekick a lot, but, I decided T-Mobile’s inability to provide syncing with the desktop (to Outlook or whatever) a huge shortcoming. The promised it was coming “real soon now” for a long time then just abandoned the idea altogether. When they abandoned the idea I abandoned the Sidekick.
After the Sidekick I tried the T-Mobile MDA (which is also known as the XDA) which is a PocketPC phone. I liked this phone a fair but although I have always preferred Palm to PocketPC, PocketPC has grown up a fair bit over the years. It was nice having a real browser (NetFront, not PocketIE) and the ability to use applications like GPS, etc. really made it a step up from the Sidekick. I still preferred the Sidekick’s keyboard to the PocketPC input, but, having real applications and a browser that supports Javascript is a big bonus. But, the MDA began to have some issues so I started looking elsewhere.
I would have been happy to stay with T-Mobile, but, they only offer the Treo 600 and what I really wanted was a Treo 650. At the current time, this means Cingular or Sprint. The voice plans are pretty comparable but the unlimited data plan on Cingular is far more expensive (although they very recently created an unlimited data plan that is far more reasonable, I think) and I primarily am interested in the data portion of the device than the voice portion. Speed between the two services seems to be more or less comparable. So, I went with Sprint.
Getting the voice portion of the service activated was easy. Getting the data portion was a big pain. It took well over 24 hours to get it all straightened out. Oh well.
If you are getting a Treo, I strongly recommend using IMAP for your mail transport and getting ChatterMail for your mail client. This gives you “push” e-mail (new e-mail comes to your server and quickly appears on the Treo in ChatterEMail). This is just great stuff that I missed since the Sidekick. For e-mail service I really love Fastmail.fm — they are hard to be for performance and features.
Yes, I do everything via webmail (plus the Treo). I have completely given up trying to handle my e-mail on my desktop/laptop because of occasional hard drive crashes, system reinstalls, etc. where I have more than once lost my entire mailbox. Now I just don’t worry about it. I keep it on the Fastmail server and know it is always there (even if I am travelling or whatever). If you really want to use Outlook or Outlook Express or whatever keep it on Fastmail (or wherever) but use IMAP. Just saves headaches.