1000 Times 1000

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Normally I do not like to whine about products or services, but in this case I do not have a choice. 2 years ago I bought the Palm Treo 650, it was new, you could check your mail with it and it had a camera! It was at no charge with a 2 year subscription, so I pretty nice deal I would say….

In the beginning it was an OK phone, I had little problems (accept with calling, synchronizing, emailing and all other stuff you do with a phone), but that is also something you have to take into account if you buy the newest products. It is a known thing for innovators to buy stuff that is very cool and on the edge, but doesn’t work that well yet (kind of a beta phase of the product).

Now after 2 years of miserable communication I would like to share my experience with you, so that you would never make the same mistake I did.

5.2 reasons why you should never buy a Palm Treo (and if it is up to me this accounts to all Palm products)
1. synchronization with Mac s#cks. If you buy a Palm, you buy it because you can synchronize your computer (contacts, email and calendar) with your phone. Palm said it was compatible with Mac which was true, if you use Palm Contacts and Palm Calendar (which are probably the worst designed software programs ever made) in stead of Addressbook and iCal (which every Mac user uses). So I had to buy a 40 dollar program to fix the synchronization. That worked for about half a year, then my Treo crashed (with capital C) and I never got it working again.
2. battery time! It lasts for 1 day, I mean… 16 hours. If you do not charge it overnight the battery will die! So my phone was more out of battery than that it did what it had to do.
3. too much software. On the Treo you can open word, excel, and powerpoint documents. WHAT WERE THEY THINKING!!! That I would like to check my excel sheet on a 2.5 inch screen? Ok, you can say, hey if you don’t want to use it you don’t have to, but I believe it is because of the effort they put into making the Treo Word, excel, etc. compatible they forgot to put time in building a stable operating system. It crashes if you put it down on a table without using your soft touch. It crashed once saying: “Not enough memory to fulfill this task”, well you should think that erasing some stuff would help right? Wrong: “Not enough memory to fulfill this task”!!!!
4. alarm. I wonder what the development team was thinking when they had that 10 hour meeting about what to do with the alarm… On a Treo they have 2 sound options; On or Off. Normally when I go to sleep I turn off the sound, but IF you want to wake up in the morning it has to make noise, right? Not possible with a Palm. “if one wants the sound off then he probably doesn’t want to be disturbed, so no alarm bells either” that must have been their logic. Donkeys! (this in combination with the battery has costs me a lot off appointments).
5. screen lights up at every thing it does… I checked my email with the Treo and then I deleted an account and entered a new one, this was a little bit to difficult for the Palm to understand. It kept trying to check my deleted email account for 18 months every 6 minutes! This resulted in an annoying beep and (if you’d turn off the volume) the screen lighted up every time. Very annoying if your with other people, because they thing your phone is receiving something.
5.5 5.1 you have to pay for (miserable) support. Do you have a problem with your Palm…. You can call for support, the only thing is that you’ll have to pay around a euro per minute for…. yeah for what exactly.. well let’s put it this way, much further then “try a reset” they won’t go.
5.6 5.2 Doesn’t it say enough if you have a troubleshoot website with over 2000 entries!!! So you build a phone and over 2000 different things do not work properly or aren’t intuitive at all. The CEO must have thought “oohh, only a couple of thousand bugs, ship it! We need the revenues”

I guess I can go on for a couple of hours, but I decided not to waste any more time on this lousy product. I’m glad it fell into the Prinsengracht (one of the canals in Amsterdam).

Looking forward to my Blackberry Pearl!