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As a newbie on this forum, I was kind of hoping someone would have some decent news about future Palm-based phones on Sprint. As an i500 owner, who has also used Treos, I am very disappointed that Sprint bailed on the Samsung i550. It appears that there are no alternatives to the horrendous brick that is the Treo 600 series, with all the attendant problems the 650 has wrought. The only device uglier is the Blackberry, any model you name. Is there ANY hope of a flip phone, or at least something that has a reasonable form factor, in the future? Or should we just get ready for Windows?
wildmac
06-13-2005, 08:13 PM
Well, now that you've insulted most of the forum's phone choices, why don't you go play on Cingular with some Symbian phones?...
davidra
06-14-2005, 04:57 AM
If you love the 650, more power to you. It appears from reading some Treo forums that everybody doesn't. My assumption was that this wasn't a Treo lovers forum, but a forum for all PDA phones. For those of us that don't care about watching movies, taking pictures or listening to rap, but instead want an easy to carry, capable PDA phone for business purposes appear to have no options on the horizon. Building all the gingerbread fun things in and leaving out adequate memory, and most importantly Wifi access makes that phone far from wonderful to people that use these in work situations. I like gadgets as much as the next person, and the i500 is far from perfect, but at least it bears some resemblance to a phone and is very stable, unlike some of the 650 posts I've seen. I would just like to see some options. Is Palm that close to going under that companies are avoiding developing Palm based PDA units? Both Kyocera and Samsung seem to have given up.
maw4bc
06-14-2005, 08:15 AM
If you love the 650, more power to you. It appears from reading some Treo forums that everybody doesn't. My assumption was that this wasn't a Treo lovers forum, but a forum for all PDA phones. For those of us that don't care about watching movies, taking pictures or listening to rap, but instead want an easy to carry, capable PDA phone for business purposes appear to have no options on the horizon. Building all the gingerbread fun things in and leaving out adequate memory, and most importantly Wifi access makes that phone far from wonderful to people that use these in work situations. I like gadgets as much as the next person, and the i500 is far from perfect, but at least it bears some resemblance to a phone and is very stable, unlike some of the 650 posts I've seen. I would just like to see some options. Is Palm that close to going under that companies are avoiding developing Palm based PDA units? Both Kyocera and Samsung seem to have given up.
I have never used it, but what is wrong with the i600?
davidra
06-14-2005, 09:50 AM
I have never used it, but what is wrong with the i600?
Only one thing, but it's a biggie....it's not a Palm-based phone....and everyone else in my office uses Palms. We beam databases, share software, and in general like the Palm operating system in spite of inherent weaknesses.
wildmac
06-14-2005, 09:53 AM
If you love the 650, more power to you. It appears from reading some Treo forums that everybody doesn't. ....
Never said it was a Treo lover's forum, but announcing yourself as a newbie and then slamming the phones a lot of us have comes off kind of strong.
That being said, I was serious about looking at the Symbian and other phones that are available on Cingular (or other GSM carrier). I really like some of them, such as the Nokia 9300/9500, and some of the others that are coming.
But the bigger question is, what do you want from your phone? You've mentioned that you don't like the Palm offerings, so what DO you want?
And let's be real. Very few people buy PDA phones, so that's why are not seeing much in the way of innovation. Couple that with how slow the US carriers are to bring new phones and tech to the market, and you get what we have now.
But if you want something like the i550, better be looking to a GSM carrier so you can get what you want.
davidra
06-14-2005, 10:23 AM
In addition to actually having used a Treo 600, my colleague has a 650 that has been providing him with considerable frustration as it won't provide the memory he needs for business transactions and crashes frequently. There are lots of other forums that have discussed the shortcomings of the Treos, and I'd expect that Treo users are aware. Sorry if I peed in anyone's cornflakes. I just would love to get a device that meets my needs, and I don't see anything coming. I use Palm by necessity. My employees run a mobile database using Palm software and we need connectivity to share that database. They don't need phones, and they're familiar with the Palm OS. What I want (which I gather not only doesn't exist but isn't in the pipleline) is a clamshell phone with a decent form factor (which excludes the Treo in my opinion), expansion (which excludes my current i500), a Palm OS, and hopefully, Wi Fi, which is MUCH more important to me than Bluetooth. It also should have at least a decent amount of onboard memory to handle databases. Given the ridiculously low cost of memory, I think it's a shame that the 650 was released with the amount of memory that inhibits it's usefullness in the business environment. I'd say about a quarter or more of the people I work with have smartphones of one kind or another, so I'm surprised the market is so slow.
wildmac
06-14-2005, 10:43 AM
The form factor is certainly an issue, but I find anything with a screen smaller than the Treo is just not usable as a PDA. I've tried others, and don't like them. YMMV. Even the i500 was too small for my tastes.
So, if you could build a until with the screen of a Treo 650, but where the keyboard folds under or slides out, that might help, but I think it's coming down to an either/or choice.
Palm is indeed struggling, that's why rollouts are so few and far between. And, considering that Verizon just signed up with the Tre650, you know Palm isn't going to roll out anything new for at least 6 months.
wildmac
06-14-2005, 10:44 AM
And the crashes on Palm are mostly due to bad software or memory space. As long as I avoid a few certain programs, and don't fill the mem to the brim, it's pretty solid.
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