I’m probably not very innovative in acclaiming the Treo 600. But I’ll do it anyway. My first PDA was a PalmPilot Professional back in 1997 or something. Since then I’ve never used any other calendar. I fell in love with the simple, fast and intuitive UI of the PalmOS, the awesome sync and backup functionality and most of all the public specifications that allow you to
create your own applications, utilities and hacks for the device.
The Treo line from Handspring combined a mobile phone and a Palm PDA. The first models were pretty crappy, to be honest. Treo 600 was the first model that really succesfully combined these two devices seamlessly. And it was the second PDA I bought (yes, the original PalmPilot lasted me 7 years without maintenance!).
So the Treo 600 is a quad-band GSM (or CDMA) phone that has PalmOS 5 inside it. Equipped with a color screen, 32 MB of memory, SD slot, ARM processor, touch screen and a miniature qwerty keyboard, it has pretty much everything I need. I could have Bluetooth and WLAN, but I’m happy with what it has. The following model, Treo 650, has a high resolution screen and Bluetooth, but it’s reported to be a battery hog.
I’m happy that Palm hasn’t given up on its original strengths: simple, clean, and powerful UI, open programming APIs, good customer support and extensibility. The Palm developer community has created probably over 30,000 freeware and shareware applications that really can turn the basic PDA into just about anything.
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