I thought I'd miss my Treo 650

[From Antonio Brooklyn, NY] When I first contemplated moving from Palm to the iPhone, I really had to think things over. What was I going to loose by changing platforms? What would I gain? The questions were not hard to answer. I just had to think whether or not I could live with those answers.

So, first, I'd be moving over to a totally new platform and saying goodbye to the Palm OS which I had been using since the Palm first came out (I had the very first Palm Pilot from US Robotics!). I even still had notes that had be carried over from that first Palm. So, I'd be saying goodbye to a system that I'd been using for nearly a decade. What would I be gaining? Well, total integration with the OS of my choice (Mac) was something that I'd welcome. You see, I've always seemed to have some issue with my Palm syncing to my Mac. Somewhere along the line something would go wrong and contacts would get deleted or I'd get duplicate calendars or whatnot. Fifty percent of the time things would not work as they should. Now I don't blame Palm for that (although I do blame them for not keeping their Mac desktop software up to date) as my Mac system was always a little wonky since I liked to mess with it a lot. But, I figured, switching to an iPhone would probably not make syncing my data any worse. In fact, it could only get better. That would be a huge time saving issue for me.

Secondly, I'd be giving up all sorts of third party applications that I purchased for my Palm. Pocket Quicken, Bejeweled 2, mSafe, Backup Man, and about a dozen others. When I started to look closely at those apps, it made me think: Well, even though I love Pocket Quicken, when was the last time I really used it? I'd been using it less and less on a daily basis and only near tax time did I sit down to enter all my receipts. And in that case, I could just break open my desktop version of Quicken on my Powerbook. What about the games? Yeah, I'd miss those, but I've been losing games on every computer platform since the Commodore 64. I could get over that. What about all the utilities? Well, those I would not miss. I realized that a majority of the programs I had on the Palm were just to get the Palm to work correctly. There were power management programs, file management programs, backup programs - all these programs probably should have been built into the Palm OS to begin with. These I could do without. Concerning other third party apps, well, I'd consider jail breaking my iPhone and see where that would take me (I have jail-broke my iPhone and installed a couple dozen apps on it).

Thirdly, there was the "cool" factor. Until I saw the iPhone, I thought the Treo and Palm OS was the best on the market. But Palm has been sitting around and not innovating any more. Other companies were pushing past Palm with all sorts of cool OSes. Now, I was not going to purchase a Windows Mobile device; that was out of the question. I know there are third party syncing programs that will let me sync those devices to my Mac, but I do not like the Windows interface at all. Then there are all the other mobile phone OSes. These are mostly garbage, in my opinion; at least for my purposes. Palm OS had the best features that money could buy. It's just, well, that Palm OS is getting old. Not that old is bad. But "new" is fun. iPhone is new and it looked like fun.

So it was with heavy heart, and a step into the unknown, when I switched to the iPhone platform. I have not regretted it at all. I found that my iPhone is as useful, if not more, than the Palm ever was to me. Sure, I miss all those cool apps for the Palm (hopefully some will get ported to the iPhone later this year) but, overall I think it was a good decision. I've spent much less time troubleshooting my iPhone, even being jail-broke, than I did with my Palm (no duplicate entries, no random hard resets, no re-entering serial numbers, no half-assed web browsers, etc). I actually find myself using the iPhone to get work done, meaningful work. It has become a useful mobile tool for me, much more than my Palm ever was (and my Palm was VERY useful!).

To me, the iPhone is just the evolution of the mobile platform that Palm made popular. The iPhone would not exist if it weren't for the Palm. There will always be a place in my heart for the Palm and it's descendants. I always keep tabs on what Palm is doing and I root for them and wish them well. And, I always keep my Treo 650 charged and ready to go if ever my iPhone fails.