Treonaut

5th day with the treo 650. Finding the builtin thumboard convenient and weirdly usable for both two or one hand typing. Remarkably stable, it does help to be a late adopter. Lovin the chat like interface for SMS. It helps a lot in picking up where you left off on your last conversation. Great battery life, finished a 40 minute vidcast, played a bunch of mp3 songs, halfway thru an ebook and several RSS feeds and it still has 17 percent left. Dunno how it fares for cellebabad scenarios, as I havent found someone foolish enough to test it with me. A pleasant surprise, your GPRS connection settings are automatically configured. No more fiddling around with GPRS chat scripts.

It also plays nicely with Tiger. No problem syncing via the USB cable or bluetooth. This has no wifi, unlike my old clie. So the most practical means of getting avantgo content is via syncing with an internet enabled computer.

Not treo sprcific, Avantgo's RSS support is a most welcome feature. Now you only need one mobile web content manager for handling RSS and web clippings for sites designed for mobile devices. The best part is that the software and service is free (up to 3mb). The wireless option also lets you choose which channel gets updated. Quite useful to cut down GPRS connectivity costs.

The bundled Realplayer is quite capable of handling mp3s, and the freeware Tcpmp is an insanely reliable video player that can play movied at 30fps.

Photoblogging is also an easy to do on the treo. Am using flickr and blogger combo to simplify posting a photo taken from the treo to flicker and to my blog. Can be done via MMS or as a versamail attachment. Although the former would be cheaper since MMS messages are billed on a flat per transaction rate. Unlike email which is billed per kb.

The usual Palm PIM goodies had also recieved some nice updates. Color coded calendar entries makes it easier to group events.

The main killer app would be PSSH, which works smoothly with the treo (just like isaw and cheap red wine). This allows you to login to your ssh enabled server whenever and wherever you like as long as your location is covered by your celco.

More on this treonatical adventures later. For now all I can say is: its a damn slick and functional convergent device.

cheers!

nox