Treo 700p Notes

As part of my ongoing silent gadget war with Steven and Cabel (shh, don’t tell them), I replaced my Treo 650 with a Treo 700p. Smug that I (temporally) hold the upper gadget hand, here are my findings:

Lame:

• Tethered Mode Blocked. With the Treo 650, you can opt for the $15/month “PCS Vision Pictures Pack” which allows you to use the Internet on your Treo 650. It also allows you to use Bluetooth DUN (Dial-up Networking) so your computer can share your phone’s Net connection. Handy.

  Sprint now blocks tethered mode with the 700p with their baseline $15/month “Power Vision Access Pack” (“Power Vision” is Sprint’s branding of EvDO). If you want to get back what you had with the 650, Sprint now wants you to pony up $40/month for their PAM (“Phone-as-Modem”) plan.

  This is especially frustrating since some guys published a hack which re-enables tethered mode sans the PAM plan. It’s obvious the distinction is wholly artificial, and sure doesn’t make it seem worth the 166% price increase. If you use tethered mode much, this issue alone may be cause for you to purchase a 650 instead of a 700p.

• Upgraded Blazer. 650’s v4.0 vs. 700p’s v4.5. The browser is faster, but I attribute this to the EvDO network. The noticeable downside to 4.5 is that its caching is too aggressive — it seemingly always prefers its cached page to what’s on the Web. My work-around is to set the “Clear cache on exit” option. However, this is non-ideal for two reasons. First, it creates a pause when you switch out of Blazer as the cache is nuked. The more surfing you’ve been doing, the longer the pause. Second, it slows down surfing in general since you’re loading images that could have been cached. The speedy EvDO network makes this less of a disaster, but it would sure be nice if caching just wasn’t broken in the first place. Imagine the speed then.

• Dialing Disambiguator Weakened. The 650’s dialing disambiguator rocked. There’s two modes when you go to call someone: you either plan to use your address book or dial a raw number. Well, numbers and letters share some buttons on the Treo’s keypad. How does the device know if which mode I’m in?

  The 650 had it nailed: it would begin assuming you’re in address book mode and that you’re typing letters. It would match your address book entries, narrowing down the matches as you typed in more information.

  But here’s the genius: if it ran out of matches, it would switch over and start interpreting all the keystrokes up until that point as numbers.

  From the user’s perspective, it just flowed. When dialing a number, I’d just focus on numbers and start dialing. Between two to four keystrokes, the 650 would get the hint and follow my intent, finally presenting an onscreen keypad. Most of the time I use my address book, however, so my intent was letters, which the 650 matched perfectly.

  I don’t know what happened between the 650 and the 700p. Perhaps some user studies demonstrated most folks where confused by the switch-over. Alas, the switch-over functionality of the disambiguator has been removed. On the 700p, if you keep typing until you run out of matches, the phone just beeps at you.

  In order to dial a raw phone number on the 700p, you have to hit the option key first (the key that’s all black), and then start dialing the number. Not the end of the world, but I’ve seen nirvana and I want it back.

• Awkward Menu Button. Palm moved the menu button from near the 5-way to the bottom-right-most button. Gah? Now it’s tricky to hit, since it destabilizes the phone when you’re holding it in one hand. With practice I’ve gotten better at keeping the phone secure while pressing the button, but initially it felt like I was going to drop the phone each time I tried to use a menu.

Random:

• Missing Sync (mostly) worked. Whew. I dropped my 650 one too many times and it gave up the ghost, so I was reliant on Missing Sync to Work As Advertised in order to restore my beloved data. It was a leap of faith — I couldn’t figure out a way to test Missing Sync’s backup/restore functionality without actually nuking my 650, so I didn’t have any proof it would actually work.

  The only things that ended up being lost are the my SoundRec recordings and camera phone pics I took but didn’t yet upload to my Mac. It was great to start with a factory-default Treo and in one HotSync get everything onto the device.

• Missing Sync works with the 700p. I don’t see a difference between how it worked with my 650. Ideal.

• Same battery as the 650. That means I now have a second battery, although I don’t know if I care.

• Recent Outgoing Popup Moved. On the Treo 650, double-tapping the hardware phone button would present a handy pop-up menu of your last ten outgoing calls. Think of it as redial, with history. Initially I filed this item under Lame because double-tapping the hardware phone button doesn’t do anything on the 700p. I thought Palm completely removed the feature. Turns out it’s still available by pressing the green button when in the Phone application.

• “ACCESS POWERED”. Power up or reset the Treo 700p, and the first thing that shows up is an ACCESS POWERED™ splashscreen, followed by the orange Palm logo. ACCESS is the wacky Japanese company that managed to buy Palm’s OS when it wasn’t looking.

• Slow Phone Off. Like the 650, this phone takes a ridiculously long time to power-off. I just clocked it at 18 seconds. I don’t understand why it’s not instantaneous. Power-up — which I would think involves more machinery than power-down — takes 14 seconds, with the phone useable at the 12 second mark (“Network Search…” proceeds asynchronously).

• Upgraded VersaMail. 650’s v3.1B vs. 700p’s v3.5.1. Usability upside: the “New” button gets default focus when launched, so the “Get” button is just a 5-way right-arrow+center-button motion away, cutting down 3.1B’s motion a single movement. Usability downside: after getting messages, nothing has focus. The first message is “selected” but doesn’t have focus, so pressing the center-button doesn’t open it. You have to up-arrow or down-arrow to give it focus, and then center-button works. This is a step backwards from v3.1B.

Nice:

• “Power Vision” is faster than “PCS Vision”. Noticeably. Technically, it’s EvDO vs. 1xRTT (the 700p handles both). The combo of more memory and faster network makes Blazer a decent web browsing experience. Watch out, however, if you’re upgrading from a Treo 650. Sprint failed to notice I could take advantage of the EvDO network (using the “Power Vision Access Pack”) and kept me on the slower “Vision Picture Pack” until I manually explicitly switched. Both packages cost $15/month, so you really want to upgrade for the better speed at the same cost.

• Voice Memo. New on the 700p. Sorely missing on the 650. The About Box says v1.4, and it feels pretty slick. It’s integrated like a dream: press and hold the side button, after a slight pause the app launches and immediately starts recording until you release the button. The resulting file is named by default with the current date+time, which is as sensible as you can get. You can scan through a recording using the 5-way. The UI is elegant. About the only thing I could ask for is a setting for the sound recording quality, although I’d probably just leave it at the current voice-quality setting.

• Keyguard now shows time+date. Since the beginning of time, one of the nice features of Palm devices is that hardware buttons would also turn on the device. It’s super-quick access to each app behind a hardware button.

  However, it’s also common to bump the buttons when it’s in your bag or in your side holster and accidently activate the device. This was bad enough with traditional Palms, but could be expensive with the Treos by initiating an accidental phone call to your aunt in Elbonia.

  Keyguard is a simple feature that locks the UI upon activation until you press the center-button on the 5-way. The center-button itself won’t power up the unit, so it’s a definite two-step between activation and clearing the guard, which is exactly what you want to mitigate accidental button presses. If you don’t press the button inside five seconds, the device automatically deactivates.

  Turns out Keyguard itself is handy. I’ve long used it on my Treo 650 to activate the unit, get the time, and power down the unit with one button press. The trick was to hit the hardware phone button, which displays the time+date above the fleeting Keyguard dialog. Now the Keyguard dialog itself shows the time+date, which means any hardware app button will do the trick.

• Vibrate when switched into silent mode. Really nice UI touch. When you switch the hardware slider into silent mode, the phone vibrates once. This means you can switch from silent to ringer by touch regardless of the current mode.

• Green light flashes on alert. Early Treo 650s were so happy they had a signal they’d flash their green LED once per second or so. Folks found that annoying, so in a firmware rev they added an option to turn that off. With the 700p, the green light is off by default, which is the right choice. Now, the green flashing light is pressed into service for alerts — like when you missed a call. This works well: you can tell now tell visually without turning on the device whether Something Happened when you weren’t paying attention.

• Finer-grained signal stregth indicator. Five bars vs. the 650’s four.

• Bigger keys. The squared-off looks reminds me of 1980’s styling, but the keys are beefier and easier to hit.

• More Memory. Practically, this means the Treo 700p is faster than the 650 even though they share the same processor at the same speed. Unloaded, the 650 and 700p would probably be neck-in-neck, but practically a well-used 650 will have between 50% and 90% of its memory in use, while my 700p is currently using only ~22% of its memory (this may be partially because of Blazer’s broken caching mentioned above).

• Better camera. But not much better.

Wednesday, July 05, 2006
12:40 AM