davidb dives in

In my previous post I described the process of how I came to obtain a Cingular-branded Treo 650. What I didn’t describe what the flurry of activity that commenced immediate thereafter.

See, I got that Treo merely two days before going to that geek-fest that was the 62nd meeting of the IETF. A new cell phone isn’t really that big of a deal — I expected it to work as a phone, and for the immediate future that was all that I needed. What was missing was a case. The store from whence the phone came had zero cases. The Cingular store near my house had none, either. I wasn’t panicked. I told myself that I didn’t need a case. I could put in my jacket pocket, or a sock, or… Ok, I needed a case. I wasn’t going to be lugging my jacket around the entire IETF, I don’t carry a purse, and the thing really wasn’t comfortable in my pants pockets (YMMV). After visiting every store in the immediate vicinity of work that I could think of, I eventually (on the day of my fight to Minneapolis) found myself in a CompUSA. And Lo, they had the $20 official “form-fitting” case for the 650. And screen protectors, but I digress. I was set.

So, I’ve had the Treo for four weeks and a day. How do I like it, you might ask? In general, I really really like it. But, I caution you, I do not place the most stringent of demands on the device. I use it as a simple phone and a PDA (which you might expect), but not really as a “mobile communication device” (more on this in a future post).

As a phone, I think the Treo works pretty well, with a few little hiccups. First the bad: a few times in Minneapolis, the audio quality was pretty bad, and a few times in my home area, I’ve heard some static. But usually the sound quality is pretty good, even at times with iffy reception. Even when the sound quality was bad, I could still understand the caller — not something I experienced with Sprint. When Sprint was bad the conversation became incomprehensible.

Now the good: It has a way better “on call” interface than the 3650, not that I consider this a difficult feat. In particular, you can get to the “mute” function without navigating through the menu structure. I’ve held the Treo up to my ear for 40 minutes straight and it felt fine. The (wired) headset that comes with the phone is pretty lame, but no worse than the 3650s. In fact, they look like the same headset with slightly different connectors. But the Treo beats the 3650 here, too. The headset jack is a standard. I plugged in the headset for my cordless phone and it worked. I could use my Xbox Live headset, as well.

There is a bunch more about the trials and tribulations of using the Treo as a PDA and as an email client, but I’ll save that for a future post.

Like Grumpy, I too have reached a point where something had to be done about my cell phone. We had the same phone (the Nokia 3650 on AT&T Wireless) because, and I’m not ashamed to admit this, I’m a follower, not a leader. At least in this corner of gadgetology.

When it comes to cell phones, I need a trail-blazer. I need that trail-blazer to come to my house and make a phone call from within my house. If that works, then we have a winner. So two years ago, I convinced Grumpy to come over and do this. Unlike my previous experience with Sprint, this worked great, so, within a week or so I became the owner of a new Nokia 3650.

Well, I’ve been fairly happy with this phone and plan for a while, but the 3650 was developing, shall we say, issues. The main issue was that the phone would unaccountably turn itself off. Not so good when you are counting on the phone to be on most of the time. More insidious however, was the problem of the phone losing the network connection with no on-screen indication of the problem. You would just try to make a phone call and have every attempt just “disconnect”. (Michael tells me that this is the “software radio” crashing. Sounds plausible to me).

But, when you need to follow, it is sort of hard to switch phones. Fortunately, I had a new trail blazer: my brother-in-law, Craig. Craig and I had a conversation that went like this:

Craig: I just ordered a Treo 650 from Cingular.
Me: Why did you get a Treo 650?
C: It was time to get a new phone...
Me: Me too!
C: and my Palm Vx is dying.
Me: Me too!
C: Yeah, I have to re-digitize it every time.
Me: Me too!

(Ok, that was condensed a lot. There was some significant amount of bitching about Cingular’s website, and a lot of wondering by me if the phone would even work in his house)

But, the bottom line was that the Treo was looking justifiable because I was both replacing my phone and my seriously aged Palm Pilot. Still, I needed some hint that the phone would work in my house. All I needed was to wait a few weeks for Craig to get the Treo and to convince him to visit. When he did, the phone call went well. At this point, I was 90% of the way to getting the Treo.

That last 10% was jumped when, not long after this when I discovered my Palm Vx, which I had left sitting in the dock charging for days, apparently out of power. This looked like a sign of doom for the Vx. I mentioned this to Pete (”The Enabler”), and he suggested that he needed to look for a new car charger for his cell phone and so why don’t we go to the Cingular/AT&T Wireless store across the street. I said sure. I was convinced at this point that the only way to get a Treo 650 was to order it on the Intarweb, but I wanted to ask some Cingular sales person about how the transition to Cingular would be given that I was an AT&T customer and they had become the same company.

We get to the store, and, in the process of asking about what getting a Treo on the Cingular network would be like, it became apparent that the store actually had the Treo 650 in stock (although not on display). 10 minutes later, I was the proud owner of a new Treo 650 and a newly useless Nokia 3650.