My Review of TreoDesktop

If you are a Treo user, or let me phrase it a bit more generally – if you are a mobile phone user, chances are you are already acquainted with what seems like the weak-spot of these devices – management of phone call information. True – some information, especially in the form of general statistics such as phone-call lengths or total data-usage in KB are available for viewing, but even those partial and lacking solutions seem to totally neglect a whole category of data which might be of crucial important to the end-user.

SMS might serve as a good example. Those quick & short messages which gradually replace such other forms of communication like actual phone-calls or e-mail, seem to be quite ignored by programmers and designers of mobile-phones, particularly when it comes to storage, retrieval and manipulation. Unlike contact list details which are searchable (though not fully and effectively unless you use some 3rd party software) and quite easily manipulated and which can be synced to the PC (using either Palm Desktop or Outlook if you are a Treo owner) the SMS application does not even give the user a search option to say nothing about export or manipulation. Similarly – most information regarding particular phone calls is either irretrievable or very difficult to access. Try for example to think what it takes to make a list of all the times you called some friend or customer in the last month and you'll get the picture of what I am talking about.

Here comes TreoDesktop, and its freeware smaller sister TreoDestop Browser, both by the excellent independent programmer Bruno Naglieri. Those applications tap into the SMS and phone-calls databases of the Treo, automatically stored on the PC during hotsync, and enables viewing, searching, and if you are using the paid full-version of the software, also an easy way to export the information into a tab delimited text file, which you can later use Excel or similar applications to mine into and manipulate.

Though offering quite basic features in its current version – TreoDesktop serves as an indispensable utility to any heavy user of the mobile phone. You want to sort all phone calls from the last three months by name or number? You've got it. Want to quickly search your SMS database for a word or phrase (e.g. an address you have been given or the details of expected meeting etc)? You've got it. Want a quick way to get a hard-copy printout of all your international phone-calls in the past few weeks? You've got it. Each call has full viewable details such as type (incoming/outgoing/missed) date, time, number, name of contact (if available) and length. Similarly all SMS details are clearly viewable and searchable by its various fields.

All in all TreoDesktop is an excellent application and a worthwhile addition to my hall-of-fame of Treo utilities. Highly recommended.

Hugs,
Maya