I've never been entirely happy with any cell phone I've owned. I'm particularly unhappy with my current service, which originates from an AT&T Wireless account. AT&T Wireless has since become a part of Cingular.
But with any luck, next week I'll move to Sprint and a Treo 700p.
I've had two problems with my Cingular service. One is that I get little or no signal at my home. Cinglar has confirmed they don't have a tower near my home, even though I live in a densly populated neighborhood in Chicago. The other problem is data service. I originally signed up with two accounts. I had one for my laptop that I seldom used, so I dropped that recently. And Cingular has been either unable or unwilling to help me set up my phone with data service. Here's why. The phone Cingular originally sold me wouldn't interface with the Mac. So I bought an aftermarket phone that syncs nicely with the Mac, the Sony Ericsson Z600. But since Cingular doesn't sell that phone, they've been pretty useless in setting it up for data. So to hell with them.
I started thinking about new phones after reading Andy Ihnatko's review of the Cingular's Nokia 6682. (That link will stop working as soon as the Sun-Times publishes another Andy article on the 20th of any month). While I wanted to quit Cingular, the capabilities of the phone intrigued me. And as I did more research, I came to feel that Andy's phone wasn't for me. First of all, despite Andy's claim to the contrary, it won't sync to a Mac yet, unless you want to dick around with Beta software. Secondly, I wanted a phone that worked on EVDO networks for high speed data. Palm's Treo 700w looked interesting because of the EVDO, but with Windows Mobile 5.0 on it, the same Mac syncing operation came into play. The good news was, there were rumors that a 700p would soon be following. That's 700p for the Palm operating system.
I've had several Palm OS devices in the past, so I'm familiar and comfortable with it. Palm has software that will sync with the Mac. And Mark/Space, a company that has the Beta version of Mac sync software for the 6682, fully supports the current Palm OS.
Sure enough, the rumors were true. The 700p ships next week for Sprint, and a few weeks later for Verizon. And the reviews have been stellar:
USAToday
PCWorld
CNET
TechWorld
PalmInfocenter
TMCNet
There are only three things I don't like:
No voice dialing over bluetooth
No GSM, so it won't work in Europe
No WiFi
But those things are trivial. I'm now in contact with a Sprint provider, and will report back when I have some experience with this amazing phone.
Leave a comment