Treo 650 Recap

I just realized that I had never recapped what I did with my Treo 650 so here goes.

I got it just before Christmas. My objective was to consolidate my gadgets. My boss walked into a conference room where I had spread out in front of me my SonyEricsson T616, my Sony Clie NX50, and my BlackBerry 7290! He said he had never seen anyone with so many gadgets. The phone was on a personal account which is why I didn't use the phone on the BlackBerry. I used the BlackBerry for work e-mail and calendaring. I used the Clie as a PDA, note taking and audio recording. I had tried to use the BlackBerry for note taking but I couldn't get the data from the BlackBerry to my laptop. It doesn't support the file transfer protocol. I've been told that later models do support this.

One thing I loved on the BlackBerry was the way it capitalized letters. If you hold a key down for a little longer, it capitalizes the letter. The Treo didn't do that which made typing harder - 2 strokes for each capital letter. The Treo does some "smart" typing, e.g. it capitalizes the next letter after a period and a space and it inserts an apostrophe in contractions like "didnt." KeyCaps600 fixed this right away. Makes the Treo work just like the BlackBerry.

Next was a capability I loved on the Clie - Graffiti. Now the Treo as it comes from PalmOne inexplicably doesn't support Graffiti. Almost as easy as KeyCaps600 fixed the capitalization, GraffitiAnywhere gave me Graffiti. But, it was Graffiti 2. The Clie had Graffiti 1. Besides the couple of letters different between 1 and 2, some of the letters and control strokes seemed to be problematic, e.g. a "l" followed by a space would never come out right. The Graffiti 2 "i" is a downward stroke with a dot over it. Using GraffitiAnywhere, you had to use a upward right to left stroke to create a dot. I never could get it right.

I found a Graffiti 1 library for GraffitiAnywhere. That got back all the Graffiti 1 strokes but I can't make any punctuation work. So I compromised. For me, the speed and accuracy of Graffiti 1 was worth not being able to make punctuation. I just use the Treo keyboard for punctuation. When I'm taking notes in a hurry, I just skip punctuation and insert them afterwards.

One of the other things I used on the Clie was the Voice Recorder application. I played with a lot of applications and ended up with SoundRec. Here's the whole story.

The Treo doesn't have much memory but most programs will run off of an SD card and most will let you direct their output to an SD card, e.g. the camera. Not all SD cards are created equally and the story is here.

The Treo had a good File Manager application and I found FileZ with equivalent (and more) function. I don't think I could get along without it. Oh, so you don't find yourself in the same situation that I did, add a Favorites button that runs FileZ before you need it.

Life isn't all work so I added a Tetris knock-off blocks133.

My other entertainment is watching videos. The way to do this is described here.

Whew! That's enough for tonight. Leave me a comment if you have any questions.

Interesting Gadget

Mediagate Portable MPEG4 Player USB 2.0 External Drive Case Enclosure

• Portable MPEG4 Player is a perfect portable entertainment box with MPEG4 playback and comes with an internal 2.5" HDD (Optional)
• Download any music, movie or photo to Portable MPEG4 Player through the supplied USB cable from your computer and bring it over wherever
• Just connect by Audio-Video cable to a monitor in a car or a TV at home and operate it by the supplied remote control
• It is also an external USB HDD (2.5 inch) which is more durable compared to 3.5 inch and it looks very slim and compact with aluminum cover