What I love and hate about Palm

[From Brad Knowles] My Palm Treo 680 is my lifeline. Phone, address book, mobile Internet access, mobile maps (Google Maps), mobile e-mail (Chatter), RSS reader (QuickNews), vital travel accessory (WorldMate Pro and Handmark Express), diet management system (CalorieKing), and so much more. I've also recently started playing with Kinoma 4.1, TCPMP, MMPlayer, CorePlayer, MobiTV, TVGuide, and more.

Anytime my wife wants to know the phone numbers for anyone we've ever talked to, or ever might want to talk to, she asks me -- and it's almost always already there, already on my phone. Addresses too. Whenever we're out somewhere and we don't know how to get from where we are to where we want to go, it's a race to see if the built-in GPS unit in the car gives us quicker and better answers, or if Google Maps does -- if I carried my Bluetooth GPS receiver with me and Google Maps was set up to use it, then Google would almost always win. Whenever we're out somewhere and looking at buying something, it's easy enough to check prices and compare, or to see which specific version of a given device might work best for us, given issues with platform compatibility, device drivers, physical space available, or whatever.

I've been using PDAs since the days before the Newton (remember Sony and MagicCap?), and I've been using Palms since before the company was bought by 3Com. I've had a Palm IIIx, m515, Sony Clié NX70V, Tungsten, T|X, and probably a few others that I can't remember. However, it wasn't until the Treo 650 came around that I was willing to make the plunge to put my phone on PalmOS, too -- I'd always depended on Nokia up until that point. PalmOS was fine for my PDA, which I carried only occasionally, because my wife doesn't like the "Bat Belt" look. But with the Treo 650, I took the plunge with PalmOS for my phone.

But the more I use these devices, the more frustrated I get. Palm gets so close to being almost perfect, and then flubs things up at the last moment. You have no idea how frustrating this is!

The Treo 680 has a horrible volume control, so you have to have third-party software to turn up the volume to the point where you can actually hear the damn thing. But this software is doing some funny things in the background, and the device becomes less stable.

The Treo has a crappy e-mail client, so you have to replace it with one of the bazillion alternatives out there, of which ChatterMail is supposed to be one of the best. But Chatter doesn't give you an option to just send messages that you've got queued, you have to "sync" your mailbox and no other option is allowed. I want to be *able* to read my e-mail on my Palm when I want to, but I don't want to be *forced* to have all my e-mail on my Palm just so that I can also send the occasional message. What the hell is going on here?

The Treo has a web client that is marginal at best (number of installations not withstanding), and one of the best alternatives is from Opera -- which is written in Java. But Palm doesn't pre-install the Java Runtime Environment, and it's a royal pain to figure out how to download it from the IBM website and install -- I've tried several times, and still haven't gotten it right yet. And there are a hell of a lot of other really nice Java programs out there, which are also made effectively unusable on Palm.

The Treo has the worst battery life of any device I've ever had the misfortune of encountering, so enterprising companies like Seidio are forced to come in and pick up the slack. But the Treo doesn't understand how these weird things with such high capacities actually work, so it suddenly decides that the battery is completely flat and has to do a panic shutdown, when the battery icon shows that the thing has at least 75% charge left! Seidio says that this situation improves after the first five or six recharge cycles, but the Palm-provided charging cable won't work to properly recharge the batteries (only the Seidio battery docking cradles do), and the batteries have such high capacity that it takes forever to drain them -- are you going to wait a month or more of having a wigged-out Treo that can't figure out this weird battery thing, before the device finally starts settling down? And what about synchronization? I just want to be able to share calendar and to-do data with my wife, and have that accessible from our desktops as well as my Treo. Using my PowerBook G4 and iSync, I can get the Palm calendar to sync with the Mac calendar, but then things get weird if I want to share that via the Internet as an .ics file. And importing those things into the Mac (or Palm) is a pain. I had thought that AirSet might be a good solution for us, but it turns out that it duplicates events between their shared calendars and the Mac calendar program, which duplicates events to the Treo, and I end up with six copies of the same damn event. And I can't update the calendar information on the Treo and have that get back out. And don't talk to me about sharing to-do data. I have yet to find anything that even attempts to work.

Why does this have to be so hard? Why do we have to be forced to tether these devices to some desktop device somewhere, so that we can install new software, synchronize data between our handheld and the desktop, then try to synchronize the desktop to some server out on the Internet, and hope all that stays properly in sync without losing any data and without unnecessarily duplicating any data?

Sure, I want to be able to sync my handheld to my desktop, when I choose. And I want to be able to sync my handheld to a server out on the Internet, when I choose. But I don't ever want to be forced to sync it with anything else anywhere in the world, in order for the thing to be useful. Why can't companies just give me naked .PRC files and documentation that I can download directly from their mobile-enabled website, instead of giving me stupid .EXE self-extracting files that will only self-extract if I'm using a bloody Windows PC with a Microsoft Albatross weighing my soul down to Purgatory?!? Why do companies like CalorieKing find it necessary to create different programs for every platform, none of which talk to each other in any way, none of which are capable of also synchronizing to their website in any way, and only the desktop versions are capable of actually printing data out? I have my Treo with me everywhere -- by my bedside when I'm asleep, next to my computer when I'm working, I even take it with me to the bathroom (where I can play a few games of solitaire or read RSS feeds, or whatever). With a good food database, this makes a very convenient tool to enter in dietary information, but that only helps me if I can get the freaking data out of the device and synchronized into a place where I can let certain specific other people see it!!!

What are the things I like best about my T|X? Speed -- it's really fast at doing most everything I use it for. WiFi networking, including programs like WiFi Where to do "war walking". Battery life -- that thing never seems to ever run down. Memory -- Palm really proved that they could shove in a lot of non-volatile RAM into the device itself, and I can just keep throwing more and more programs on there, and it never seems to fill up. The beautiful screen, which can be rotated from 320x480 to 480x320, and which seems to display most multimedia better than just about any other portable device I've ever seen.

What do I like least about my T|X? Keyboard -- it desperately needs an integrated QWERTY keyboard, or at least a Bluetooth thumboard that is built into a hard case and can be used in a twist-n-flip manner. Lack of built-in WWAN networking, so that when I'm out somewhere and WiFi isn't available, I can still use it to connect out to devices on the Internet.

What do I like most about my Treo? Keyboard -- the thumboard is really cramped, but Palm clearly did a lot of research and made sure that it was actually usable, unlike virtually everyone else in the business. Built-in WWAN networking -- it's slow, but at least I can get a connection in most places, and since this is GSM/GPRS/EDGE as opposed to CDMA, I can even use it in most other countries in the world. Memory -- second only to the T|X.

What do I like least about my Treo? Screen -- this thing desperately needs to be 320x480/480x320, or at least expandable to 320x480/480x320 (e.g., the Tungsten slider). The square 320x320 screen may still be bigger than most Windows Mobile devices, but that's no excuse. Battery -- the standard Palm battery just plain sucks boulders, and battery has always been a huge complaint of Treo owners. They should at least have had an official Palm-provided extended battery option. Speed -- this thing is dead-dog slow most of the time. Maybe it's all the third-party programs I've had to load on to compensate for all the other weaknesses in PalmOS, or maybe it's just that the device is plain dead-dog slow, but Palm should put in a higher speed CPU and then use aggressive underclocking to reduce battery usage when the performance isn't needed. WiFi -- there's just no excuse. We know how tiny the SDIO cards are that can provide WiFi for these devices and that presumably includes a lot of SecureDigital-specific circuitry that would not be necessary if the device was integrated. Reliability -- this thing crashes on a regular basis. I've got BackupMan and Backup.net, and they've saved my butt several times. But I shouldn't have to back up my device every five seconds, in order to keep it from being totally trashed because the OS is inherently unstable.

The real irony here? One of the best (and still the fastest) devices that Palm has ever produced was the Tungsten|C. Still the fastest WiFi you can get in any PalmOS device, and one of the fastest CPUs I've ever seen in any PalmOS device. Decent thumbboard. Okay, it didn't have a 320x480/480x320 screen, but that and the WWAN are the only two things it lacked.

I'm really starting to see the appeal of the Apple iPhone. Yes, it does much less than my Treo. Or my T|X. But Apple controls the full user experience on all sides (in some cases, via tightly controlled third parties), and they can give a much tighter and cleaner package. Does less, but does much better at the things it does actually do. And it will do more over time.

PalmOS is dead, and there's little hope of GarnetOS ever being able to deliver on much of anything that Palm has ever promised. Palm fiddled while Rome has been burning the last decade or so.

As a third-party, there's not much hope that ALP will be able to deliver on those things, either. Palm has clearly been sucked into the Windows Mobile world, and it's going to leave the rest of us high and dry.

Unless, that is, every single member of the Palm community gets off their butt and beats the living crap out of the company and *forces* them to actually go and do the job that they should have done five years ago.