Turtles all the way down

I’ve never been big on smartphones as I tended to look at them as expensive phones that act like under-powered PCs. But they have gotten cheaper, faster and better of late. Missing my Helio Ocean, I took the plunge.

I narrowed it down to a Blackberry, HTC Mogul, and the Treo 755p. I opted for the latter as it had all of the features I needed, especially Goodlink, which is the only way I can have mobile access to my work email.

Overall, I am impressed. While PalmOS isn’t much different now than when I had a Palm V in 1999, the applications are much better. I love being about to sync my contacts with my desktop, and to have an address book that allows me to enter more than just 12 characters and a phone number. This is almost worth the cost of entry itself. I’ll never go back to a phone that doesn’t have the address book sync / backup feature.

Furthermore, with Goodlink, I can sync said contacts, along with email, my calendar, and to do list with my firm’s Exchange server. Very nice.

I’ve also set up a couple of personal POP3 email accounts. Aside from a quirk where the phone doesn’t always delete emails on the server when you tell it to, this feature works well. All major IM portals are supported as well, and it allows simultaneous access to each. Loading IM contacts is noticeably slower than it was on the Helio Ocean, perhaps because there is no server component streamlining the over-the-air data.

Google maps is mandatory these days. While the phone has no GPS which is a major bummer, the app is still quite useful and supposedly an upgrade will use cell tower coordinates to simulate GPS. The camera is 2 megapixels, which is just about standard now, and the phone plays MP3s, which is also expected and standard.

One major complaint. The battery life, frankly, sucks. I can get two days out of a charge if I barely use the phone. If I make voice calls or leave Goodlink enabled, I can barely get one day. This is after turning down the screen brightness, and deactivating Bluetooth and infrared. Supposedly a third-party extended life battery doubles the stand battery’s capacity, but at $70, this is a pretty serious accessory.

Speaking of data, the EVDO access is fast, and the phone’s web browser is excellent. No complaints in that respect. I haven’t tried using the phone as a PC modem yet, however.

I’ll give the 755p a weak thumbs up. It does everything I want and need out of a phone. With a better battery it would have been a home run.

Update 12/30/07: A couple of quirks worth mentioning. First, the POP email client has an option that allows you to delete messages on the server. It doesn’t work most of the time and I’m trying to figure out why. Also, the OS gets sluggish when its doing a large data transfer. Nothing terrible however.