Whats wrong with the Treo 650

My Treo 650 is an odd device; it combines one of the best interfaces of any mobile device with strong multimedia and is not a bad phone. On the other hand, it has many obvious omissions and deficiencies; It is as if device was designed by a genius, and then in a last-minute cost-cutting operation, features were removed at random by an angry monkey:

Its far to easy to bemoan the Treo 650’s lack of WiFi, and the lame excuses provided by PalmOne; who rather incredibly stated that it would be technically impossible to build a hand held device that could use Bluetooth, GSM and 802.11b.

It took the work of a gifted hacker to show that all Treo 650 devices are perfectly capable of using the PalmOne WiFi adaptor; exposing PalmOne’s rhetoric as the contemptuous bullshit. If only this were the only weakness holding back the Treo 650.

Clearly, this feature was disabled at the request of the phone company who greedily wish us to use their overpriced GPRS data-services for all networking; This does not quite explain some other glaring inadequacies of Palm OS;

For example why do we have to put up with Hotsync; the primary technology used to synchronize the Palm device with a PC. Hotsync was looking rather stale back in 1999 when Microsoft first unveiled their dynamic ‘ActiveSync’ technology which allowed real-time replication of data between PC and pocket devices. In the last five years Hotsync remains conceptually unchanged from it’s very first incarnation.

At this point Hotsync apologists will wonder what I am complaining about; after all it is the simplest cross-platform synchronization technology and it does a relatively good job of replicating simple data.

My gripe is that it is slow compared to modern replication techniques – one need only look at rsync to see how blindingly efficient synchronization can be. Hotsync devices cannot be mounted as file systems, making it tedious to load a palm with non palm-native files. For example, there is no convenient way to load a Palm device with MP3 files even though it is perfectly capable of playing them.

And while I am on the subject; why doesn’t Palm OS provide native Bluetooth and USB Mass-Storage emulation? Sure there are commercial products (costing about $20 each) that add this feature; but which palm user does not need to transfer files? Why are Palm not licensing these programs for all Palm OS users in an effort to be minimally competitive?

I am baffled that PalmOne cannot see the problem here; Microsoft users have been able to drag and drop files into their Pocket devices for years now; this feature is blatantly missing from Palm OS, which offerers roughly the same set of core features as it did five years ago.
Actually this is a theme that runs through the whole Palm OS experience; that of opportunities missed and a strange, antique selection of desktop applications which have somewhat failed to keep up with the times. Take multimedia – Palm has placed it’s trust firmly with RealMedia who have made one of the worst music-player applications for the platform.

Why make the device standardize on the least widely used audio format; wouldn’t it be best to bundle the system with a really good multi-format audio player? What about an audio player that could emulate a number of leading hardware MP3 players in order to work with the most common music library software. How hard would that be?

I think you get my drift here; The Treo 650 is a great device; Its still the best organizer phone. It is still the best for texting and overall ease of use, but it could have been so much more. A combination of corporate interests and a lack of imagination add up to a whole lot of wasted opportunity.