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[Previous entry: "New version of trillian out."] [Main Index] [Next entry: "LOTR glowing sword"] 12/18/2004 Entry: "Treo 650 review." Treo 650 review. For someone whose been using a T-Mobile Sidekick for the last two years, I'm pretty much blown away by this device. Its what I wished the Sidekick could be. First off, its Palm, so I can install all those palm apps out there, compared to the handful of T-Mobile approved Sidekick apps. I love the fact I can just download a book from Project Gutenberg and load up TealDoc (a free document editor) and have an ebook wherever I go. When I close TealDoc it remembers what page I was on, for all my files. Its a shame more apps don't do this. Hell, even Acrobat Reader doesn't do this by default. That's just wrong. Oddly enough, the built-in ebook reader can't do .txt files.
Click on "link to this entry" to read the full review.
The browser is easily the most advanced one I've ever seen on a mobile. With its brilliant screen (and I do mean brilliant, its extremely bright) the graphics look great. The browser, blazer, is pretty much a full blown browser. It understands Javascript, tables, CSS, etc. Spint's CDMA service is only 144mbps at max speed, but its more than enough to get some casual browsing done. At least enough to visit your bank account (yes it supports SSL encryption), movie times, etc. The photos on my blog look great on this little device. Its 320x320 pixels and the colors are very vibrant. The browser of course resizes images, but still needs to download the whole image to do so. It doesnt run through any proxies, although that is an option. I could run Squid on my home PC, set it up with my ad blocking hosts file, and never download ads. Or I could subscribe to a proxy server service which resizes graphics. I'm not sure if Squid can do this. Also, the browser has a special "wide mode" which makes web pages look like what they look like on your home computer, but you have to scroll horizontally.
The MP3 player is a lot of fun. There is only 23 megs of flash memory on this thing, but I put in a 512 meg SD card. With a little $5 adapter from Radio Shack I can insert any 1/8th inch headphone jack into it and listen to MP3s which sound surprisingly good. If there are no headphones installed, it will use the speakerphone speaker to play music. The downside is that you have to buy the 3/32" adapter from Radio Shack. It should have a regular headphone jack considering they promote its MP3 abilities pretty often. It has bluetooth, but I dont own any bluetooth products so it doesnt do anything for me. Eventually, treo/sprint will fix Bluetooth Dial Up, which will allow me to connect my laptop to the phone and use the phone to access the internet via Sprint's 144kbps CDMA connection, wirelessly. How cool is that going to be? Actually, if you don't want to wait, you can buy an app called PdaNet which does this. The email app is top-notch. Not only does it support both POP and IMAP, it will even do SSL over POP or IMAP. It doesn't seem to do any auto-fetching, so you have to click on "Get" to pull your mail. The downside is that it can't do HTML mail. The camera is pretty good. Its at VGA resolution which is 640x480 pixels. Like all CCD cameras it works like crap in low-light conditions, but seems to work well enough in a normally lit room. Its PalmOS, so it can't multi-task. This is a pretty big con, but I'm already used to it. Once I leave an app, the app closes itself, except for the MP3 player, which will continue playing music in the background. I do believe the app itself closes, but that's transparent to the user. Its a lot thinner than my sidekick and doesn't hurt my ear when talking into it as its designed to look and act like a cell phone, albeit one with a giant screen and a tiny but usable keyboard. Browsing is so much more pleasant on this than on the sidekick, because the sidekick goes through a proxy (usually very slow and over-burdened) and slowly loads webpages pixel line by pixel line. Blazer loads the text first and then loads images, like a normal web browser so you can read as the page loads. Sprint's reception (both voice and data) seems to be better than T-Mobile's here in Chicago also. I was getting sick of losing the T-Mobile GPRS connection every hour or so and having to reset the wireless or reboot the device just to load one page. I'm was also sick of waiting for T-Mobile to release an app every few months or so. Open development is a good thing and leads to lots of third-party apps. So far I've installed these third-party apps. I'm no palm expert but there seems to be a net consensus that these are some of the good ones: 3D Hockey: Very fun air hockey game. The screen on the treo is a touch screen and there's just something neat about controlling the paddle with my finger. (shareware)
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