Cowboy Caleb the liberal arts, grown-up stuff & random mischief

It’s Like A Monkey On My Back

As mentioned a trillion times before, I now use a powerpc phone, namely the Dopod for my daily communication needs. Now that I’ve had it for almost a month, I think it’s high time I wrote one of my scathing and realistic reviews.

Imagine you had a swiss pen knife that could also cure cancer. In the middle of perusing your swiss pen knife to open a can of baked beans, a lovely young lass with rosy cheecks and swelling bosom rushes in through your front door and throws herself at your mercy to use aforementioned swiss pen knife to cure her aged mother of cancer. Of course with her wobbling bits enticing your throbbing manhood, you would abandon your original task of opening the can of baked beans and proceed instead to cure that old cow of cancer so you could reap the rewards of harvesting the lovely young lass’s cherry youth later.

Fast forward to modern day reality: - You are using your phone to create a calendar appointment/task/sms and suddenly the phone rings. A few things are liable to happen:

1. You answer the call and lose whatever you were doing earlier
2. You don’t answer the call and lose whatever you were doing earlier
3. You answer the call, but the phone program freezes so you dont get to speak to the caller and you lose whaever you were doing earlier
4. The phone hangs and you have to reboot

The idea of a phone and a PDA in the same hardware sounds great - but it doesnt always work. Man, this f87king phone is high maintenance both emotionally and physically. There are so many problems with it, I don’t know where to start. I spend at least an hour a day fixing problems that come along from the installation of new programs or from internal system errors. Life was so much easier when all my phone could do was call home.

Despite all this, because I now use it - I can’t stop. Life can never be the same. It’s like after you’ve had really good wine, you can never go back to the slop they push to you at cheaper restaurants anymore. My advice, PDA phones are not for the lazy or faint-of-heart. Unless you really need one, just stick to your normal cell phones.

I have *never* missed a call due to a hang, on my Treo 650. As long as you don’t install some funky 3rd party apps, the Treo 650 is ROCK SOLID.

Even if the battery goes out, all the data is still there after recharge (no need to connect to computer).

The screen is also higher-resolution than Dopod. Treo 650 is 320×320.

The only downside is the Treo’s low-resolution camera. The picture quality is very good though, for a phone camera. And it does video.

Forgot to mention, free software for the Treo number in the THOUSANDS.

Check out the forums below,
spug.net
mypdacafe.com
freewarepalm.com

Yeah… same here. Treo 650 user.

Have had no problems thus far. The last time it “hanged” on me was like a month ago, and that probably happened cos I was running low on battery…

So yeah, you might wanna check out the Treo 650?

Ah good one Cowboy. Never realised that could be a problem with PDA phones. Lately I considered getting one. Didn’t used to like them bec. if one of the function don’t work and you gotta send it in for repair, you lose both functions instantly. But lately I’ve changed my mind. Now you’ve pointed out something that I wasn’t aware. I’ll reconsider carefully. Thanks for the tip.