Slashdot Mirror
More Problems for the Treo 650
koreth writes "PalmOne's new Treo 650 smartphone is one of the season's most eagerly-anticipated gadgets. But it looks like they let it out of the gate too early. First there was the memory problem, which, to PalmOne's credit, they addressed quickly. That satisfied me and I bought one, only to find that while it's a great device in a lot of ways, as a phone it stinks. From the other end, it sounds like I'm inside a cardboard box, and lots of other people are complaining about the same thing. No word yet from PalmOne on this problem. Any other 650 owners having problems with their new units?"
One would think they'd take the good parts of the 600 (namely the radio/phone part) and merely add a higher resolution screen and other small improvements rather than seemingly designing it from the gound up again.
As long as the phone is problem free before it comes over to ATT/Cingular side. I don't mind it Sprint users beta test a final product, till Palm gets it right. =)
WTF does Sony have to do with this?
Probably a good idea to read the forums before buying the product.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
Or a hands-free bluetooth headset. That way you can use the PDA as a PDA instead of messing with wires or having to hold it to your ear.
"From the other end, it sounds like I'm inside a cardboard box, and lots of other people are complaining about the same thing. No word yet from PalmOne on this problem. Any other 650 owners having problems with their new units?"
Okay, let me get this straight. The guy bought a phone without testing the quality first, now that he has had it a while he decides he is unsatisfied and wants the people he bought it from to do something about it?
You, my friend, are a sucker in every aspect of the word. You bought a phone because of all the gimmicks without actually making sure it was adequate as a phone.
Just to keep moderators off my back, imagine this:
"Yes, I bought this Porsche and it does not accelerate fast enough, what are you going to do to fix it?"
These two match up well with my logic. I mean, if the phones had a tendancy to explode or fail due to faulty components, that would be different. But this is a simple case of a product not being very good and will probably improve only in the next model. Really, what incentive would they have to sell you another PDA phone in two years if the one you have now works perfectly?
--
I'd rather see a hundred comments unmoderated than see a hundred comments moderated badly by some jerk with an axe to grind. --CmdrTaco 6/26/00
As was discussed previously on slashdot, cell phone makers tend to pile huge amounts of unrelated functionality, rather than produce a phone with good sound and reliable service.
The reason is obvious. It costs a hell of a lot more to increase service reliability than it does to add tetris.
And for some reason, the market is completely tolerant of this....
Really???
I've had my 600 for 6 months now and I've had zero problems with reliability. In fact, one of the things that has impressed me most about the 600 is how solid it is. Perhaps it's not that your Treos were built like crap, but that your employees treeated them like crap??
I can second this. My Ericcson(sic, probably) T68i sounded like absolute shit on the network that sold it to me. Eventually, I had enough of their billing mistakes and bad reception and moved to another network. Everyone I talked to said "Hey, you got a new phone? It sounds great!"
WTF is with Slashdot's anti-Palm spin lately?
I just hope this kind of thing will stop the phone integration hell that everyone is riding. Give us simple phones!
Not everyone wants a integrated mess, some of use just want small clean simple phones that work and are dirt cheap. I don't want color screens (or need more like it), cameras, office apps, keyboards......
I just want a very small phone, that gets good battery life, is durable, have a vibrate mode (most every phone has this now), a well thought out phone book, an alarm clock, no protruding antenna.
All this other crap is just that, and makes a phone cost way more then it should, plus make it more buggy, and harder to use.
Fortunately there is some growing movement against integration, there was some study a bit back showing people more and more want their simple phone back. But for now we are forced to get this train wreck of phones since phones with just the basic features are big huge dinosaurs that leave people going for the gadget filled phone just to avoid having a huge clunky phone.
It sounds like the crystal itself is getting overwhelmed and doing the cancelling. This is a problem with some of the smaller microphones that are IMHO crap. It's also used as a feature on noise cancelling hearing protectors as it cuts way down on needed electronics. Police headsets
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
You are not too far wrong in your subject line, even if everything after that is bogus. By posting about this to Slashdot I did have the thought in mind that more publicity would light a fire under PalmOne to offer up a good solution to the problem. It has worked once with this product already on the memory issue. I also wanted to make potential buyers aware that they may run into this problem, and that if they do, they aren't alone.
As I said in the article, other than this problem, the 650 is an amazing little device, and if they fix this issue, I'll be very happy with it and won't hesitate to show it off to all the early-adopter geeks I know. Actually I already have done that a bit, and even with the iffy sound quality most of them are still drooling over it. There are tons of awesome things about it.
But hey, I guess only Microsoft employees have a motivation to speak up when they're not satisfied with a competitor's product, right? After all, nobody would ever post a negative comment about anything if they weren't being paid to do it.