Palm Treo Windows Version

This review brought to you by TJ from GTFO.

So here’s the deal. I was a happy crackberry addict. Happy. I didn’t care when folks were annoyed that I was crackin while they tried to talk to me. I was happy in my lil' text world of productivity. The keys were the right size, they typed, lil' thumb wheel for all manner of functions… I could do this while driving…which of course is dangerous so I wouldn’t even think of it. I was so addicted that I got a contact high from watching that freak smoker Shane from Survivor Panama flip out and use a rock as his blackberry. Serious.

So imagine my panic when I learned that my new company used Palm Treo Windows Version. I begged, I pleaded, I bargained. I went through all 7 stages of the Kubler Ross stages of Blackberry withdrawal, which as you know ends with acceptance. I was defeated. I accepted. So I bought my wife a Treo so I could watch her learn to use it and see for myself if I could learn to love it. She took to it instantly... IMing, playing games, calculating numbers… it seemed okay. I made one error in my plan however. She had a Palm Treo NOT windows version.

So here is the promise. The Palm Treo is a mobile office computer. It syncs up with your Outlook wirelessly… you type a new contact into your Outlook, it shows up on your Treo justlikethat. You can open full files like excel and word and it sizes them instantly. You can surf the web on a real windows browser with real windows pages, not that funky half breed edition Blackberry used. You can text message, picture message. It has a dial pad that you can dial up and a touch screen window, It comes with a little stylus that you can use on the little online keypad. Its full color. It fits neatly into your coat pocket. It looks like a phone. It has everything you can think of needing and some stuff I am not even aware of. And that my friends is the whole damn problem. The Palm Treo for Windows is an ADD jack of all trades - master of none - piece of crap.

One of those nifty features, the touch screen, will actually flick through a series of menus and programs while you talk on it, cuz the heat from your cheek will set it off. Once my phone called ME while I was talking to my boss on it. Then it fricken conferenced itself IN. So I heard me- talking to me- talking to my boss- hearing me talking to me….THEN it locked up, cuz it’s windows after all. This happened more than once. So I switched to using a hands free device. It freezes up on Bluetooth with no real pattern of timing. It blacks out when you attach a wired headset. It seems to want your cheek to do all of its nefarious activities… it will hound you until you do.

The battery life is another issue. If you leave it in the wall all day charging, THAT is enough to drain your battery. The best way to conserve your battery power on this damn thing is to take your battery out and use a regular phone. And even if you do, your battery will be down to about 5 parsecs when you put it back into your phone to use it. If you happened to drive your battery down, you have to charge it up before you can turn it back on and THAT is where you get into your Catch 22. You need your battery to talk on the phone but you drain your battery when you do. WTF!

And that little stylus they give you? Here is my most earnest warning on this review: Don’t use it while you are at Starbucks. It feels just like a coffee stirrer and you are libel to throw it in the trash with your cup like I did in Atlanta one morning. I didn’t discover this fact until I tried to pull it back out in a meeting 3 hours later- you should have seen the looks of people’s faces as a I tapped furiously on my Treo with a bent coffee stirrer. Then my battery went dead as it tried to take a picture. F-ing thing.