Simon Barratt

Treo 750

Cingular have finally released the Treo 750 in the USA.  I have had the mis-pleasure of using it under NDA since the beginning of December last year.

This is my first Windows based phone, having always used a Palm OS based one previously.  I really did want to give it a go and see how it worked.  We are moving to Exchange and figured adopting a Windows based phone as the new standard for FMC would make sense.  Up until now, we have great success with the Treo 650, with Lotus Notes as the email back-end.

In addition to all the Windoze based stuff (yes it is slow), with this phone Cingular offer 3G data access (UMTS).  Philadelphia is UMTS ready, so I thought that would be good.  In reality, what I find is that the phone makes the wrong decision about hanging on to a dwindling UMTS signal, rather than jump to a good GPRS signal.  Which means you get nothing.  The phone just stops receiving calls and data.  I did work with Palm, and only a hard reset helped this out.  But even now, it still has a hard time flipping from UMTS and GPRS.  Maybe that is fixed in the shipping phone.  And when it comes down to it, for average corporate use, we don't need the UMTS speeds - this is a phone, with email, calendar and contact access and occasional web access.  I was pleasently surprised however, that the 'Search' field on the Today page uses Google.

Battery life is a joke though.  Palm have trimmed the battery size by 20%, to make the phone smaller, so you get less capacity to start with.  Add Windows to the mix, and you are lucky if you last 20 hours.  If I forget to plug it in the wall at night, the battery is always dead by morning. I have had to purchase a USB changer, so I can steal power from my laptop to keep it going!

The icing on the cake is the Windows OS itself.  I can't understand why the OS wants to be the centre of attention!  Stop popping up with all sorts of messages.  I don't want a pop when the battery is getting low, I can see the battery indicator already - it should just change colour.  I don't want a popup saying I have new email.  I always have new email.   I do, however, want to be able to select multiple emails in my inbox and delete them.

But most of all I want my iPhone Palm OS back.  I used to go for a few days with that sucker without charging.  We have aging Treo 650's in our organisation, with a high percentage of them being used at the VIP level.  We have to decide what their next phone will be.  After using the 750, I am sure it is not that.  I think the Treo 680 makes more sense.  It is the same size as the 750, looks good, does everything we need, is responsive, spans the globe and best of all requires to re-training of the VIPs!

Microsoft, you really need to rethink you mobile phone OS strategy.  You have succeeded in making the phone as complicated to use as a PC, and that should never of happened!