{"id":140,"date":"2009-09-06T22:39:22","date_gmt":"2009-09-07T05:39:22","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=140"},"modified":"2014-05-25T23:01:21","modified_gmt":"2014-05-26T06:01:21","slug":"goodbye-treo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/archives\/2009\/09\/06\/goodbye-treo\/","title":{"rendered":"Goodbye, Treo.  Hello, Pre!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>After four years, I&#8217;ve finally said goodbye to my trusty but beaten-up Treo 650.  I started noticing screws missing from it about a month ago, and a couple of weeks ago I lost the antenna, which fell off somewhere without my noticing.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/images\/200909.treo\/treo1.jpg\" class=\"unemphasized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/images\/200909.treo\/treo1.th.jpg\" width=\"120\" height=\"120\" alt=\"Thumbnail #1 of my poor, beaten-up Treo\" \/><\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/images\/200909.treo\/treo2.jpg\" class=\"unemphasized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/images\/200909.treo\/treo2.th.jpg\" width=\"120\" height=\"120\" alt=\"Thumbnail #2 of my poor, beaten-up Treo\" \/><\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/images\/200909.treo\/treo3.jpg\" class=\"unemphasized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/images\/200909.treo\/treo3.th.jpg\" width=\"120\" height=\"120\" alt=\"Thumbnail #3 of my poor, beaten-up Treo\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The chipped paint and smudged icons on the buttons?  That&#8217;s the result of 3&#189; years of sharing a pocket with my keys.  That weird cloud in the center of the screen?  It&#8217;s dust that seeped in and collected there.  That hole in the back cover?  I drilled that so that I could easily access the reset button with the stylus. (I admit that it might have contributed to the dust problem.)<\/p>\n<p>I actually could have tried transferring my number to my dad&#8217;s old Treo 650, but I decided it wasn&#8217;t worth the hassle.  No more reception was the push I needed to buy the new Palm Pre. (Sorry, iPhone, but <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/archives\/2003\/12\/20\/the-keyboard-of-my-dreams\/\" class=\"unemphasized\">I&#8217;m a (wanna-be) keyboard snob<\/a>.) This also marks the end of nine years of using Palm OS.  <\/p>\n<p>The Palm Pre is nice.  There are a few significant things and a lot of little things that I miss from the Treo 650, but having a modern web browser makes up for all the deficiencies.  When I think about it, I realize that I was pretty satisfied with everything about the Treo except for its anemic and ancient browser. <\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The good:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>The web browser is great.<\/strong>  It&#8217;s WebKit-based, just like the iPhone, and it even claims to be Safari in its user-agent string.<\/li>\n<li><strong>The screen is beautiful.<\/strong>  Too bad it&#8217;s plastic and not glass, though.  It also collects fingerprints easily.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Having Wi-Fi is great.<\/strong>  I have an unlimited data plan, but Wi-Fi lets me surf the web despite the spotty cell phone reception I get at my house.<\/li>\n<li><strong>The Exchange support seems to work well.<\/strong> I can access my work email without hassle, and it syncs with my Outlook calendar. (Maybe this means I no longer need to use <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/archives\/2004\/08\/28\/boy-do-i-hate-outlook\/\" class=\"unemphasized\">Outlook at work<\/a>&#8230;)<\/li>\n<li><strong>It&#8217;s so much smaller than my old Treo<\/strong> that my pants pocket feels empty with it inside.<\/li>\n<li><strong>The camera is much better.<\/strong>  The picture quality is still not very good&#8212;it&#8217;s still a cell phone camera, after all&#8212;but the Treo 650&#8217;s camera was barely passable.  The LED flash and the mirrored back surface for self-portraits are also nice touches.<\/li>\n<li><strong>The built-in GPS is nice<\/strong>, and it&#8217;s really fast.  It&#8217;s slightly disturbing that Google Maps&#8217; satellite view can locate me inside my house with reasonable accuracy.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Palm actually seems to be releasing OS updates for the Pre.<\/strong>  With their old Palm OS systems, Palm rarely updated anything and instead opted to release new versions of the software only with new hardware models.  This could be because it&#8217;s simply easier for Palm to update software on the Pre, or maybe it&#8217;s because webOS is relatively immature.  We&#8217;ll see if the updates last.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The not-so-good:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>webOS is pretty, but <strong>there are very few affordances<\/strong>.  It can be unclear which pages are scrollable (and even in which direction).  It&#8217;s unclear when applications support landscape mode.  The mechanism to delete things is inconsistent (the mechanism to delete an application is completely different from the one to delete a bookmark.  Deleting email is performed the same way as deleting bookmarks except it has no confirmation.) Maybe that&#8217;s unavoidable with the Pre&#8217;s dependence on gestures; I don&#8217;t know of any good affordances for them, but I think the space deserves more exploration and experimentation.<\/li>\n<li><strong>What affordances it does have are sometimes inconsistent.<\/strong>  For example, when you press a modifier key, the cursor shows a colored dot to indicate this, but this doesn&#8217;t happen for the cases where webOS auto-shifts for you (e.g. at the beginning of a new sentence).  Some pop-up lists have arrows indicating that they&#8217;re scrollable, but others don&#8217;t.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Needs more keyboard shortcuts.<\/strong>  Since it has a physical keyboard, it should take better advantage of it.<\/li>\n<li>Some operations are reversed from the Treo:\n<ul>\n<li>When auto-shifting happens undesirably, pressing backspace on the Treo would unshift and let you type in a character unmolested.  On the Pre, the model is to type the character first, and pressing backspace afterward will replace that character with its lowercase version. (That this backspace-correction happens only with auto-shifted characters and not with explicitly-shifted characters might explain why there&#8217;s no affordance for the auto-shift state, but the whole thing feels a bit weird and unpredictable.  Maybe it&#8217;ll take getting used to, but I think objectively it means that I can&#8217;t type a sentence without pausing after the first character to see if it needs correction.  I thought the old Palm OS model was more self-consistent and worked fine, and changing it to a new one without any obvious benefit seems frivolous.)<\/li>\n<li>The Treo&#8217;s symbol key showed symbols related to the character you just typed (e.g. &#8220;e&#8221; and  &#8220;&eacute;&#8221; or &#8220;&euro;&#8221;) and replaced it.  The Pre expects you to press the symbol key first, which list of all symbols.  Typing a character then filters the list to show only related symbols.  This change seems less egregious.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Another consequence of the modifier-key model is that <strong>the penalty for accidentally pressing a modifier key is higher<\/strong>.  On the Treo I could just press backspace to undo the mistake, but the Pre requires two keypresses (either pressing the modifier key two more times to cycle from shift to caps-lock to normal or pressing a character and backspacing over it).<\/li>\n<li><strong>I miss having the directional pad.<\/strong>  Being able to use the Treo without needing to touch the screen was nice.  Trying to click on tiny hyperlinks in the web browser can be a bit annoying.  The capacitive touchscreen is nice, but I miss being able to use a stylus when I want more precision.<\/li>\n<li>No stylus means that I no longer have with me a third-party stylus with a built-in ballpoint pen wherever I go.  Alas.<\/li>\n<li><strong>The Treo 650 had a much better keyboard.<\/strong>  The Treo&#8217;s hard, chiclet-style keys feel better and give more tactile feedback than the rubberized keys of the Pre.  Still, I prefer having the rubber keys to a virtual keyboard.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Searching is inconsistent.<\/strong>  The Pre has so-called &#8220;universal search&#8221;, except it doesn&#8217;t actually search through everything on the device.  It doesn&#8217;t search memos, nor does it search email.  The Memos application has its own internal search feature, and there&#8217;s no way at all to search email. (Searching email by subject reportedly will be added in the next OS update, however.)<\/li>\n<li>The &#8220;Synergy&#8221; feature to combine calendars\/contacts from multiple sources sometimes gets in the way.  <strong>I don&#8217;t want all the random people<\/strong> I&#8217;ve sent email to or received email from to show up in my address book.  I don&#8217;t really want people from my AIM buddy list to show up there automatically either, especially not with names like &#8220;example123&#8221;.<\/li>\n<li><strong>I miss having the expandability of an SD slot.<\/strong>  It was a convenient way to install things on my Treo, and being able to preview photos from a digital camera on a bigger, better screen was useful.  To be fair, though, the Treo 650 didn&#8217;t support anything larger than a 2 GB SD card, and the Pre has 8 GB of internal flash memory.<\/li>\n<li><strong>There&#8217;s no camcorder application for the Pre.<\/strong>  I didn&#8217;t use that often on the Treo, but it was nice to have it available, and it was useful on the few occasions where I did need it.<\/li>\n<li><strong>No LED indicators<\/strong> to show when I have unacknowledged voicemail or email.  The Pre does have external LEDs, but they&#8217;re not put to good use. (Apparently this also might be fixed in the next OS update.)<\/li>\n<li><strong>Sprint&#8217;s current cell phone plans are way more expensive than their old one.<\/strong>  I was paying Sprint about $80\/month for my old, two-line family plan with unlimited data on one of the lines.  To use the Pre, I needed to switch to a new plan, and the cheapest family plan is $130\/month for two lines and assumes you want unlimited data\/SMS on both.  It turned out to be cheaper for me to get a separate basic plan for my mom, although it still comes out to be a total of $100\/month.  At least I can get a 20% discount through VMware.  And yet somehow the plans are still cheaper than the AT&#038;T iPhone plans.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After four years, I&#8217;ve finally said goodbye to my trusty but beaten-up Treo 650. I started noticing screws missing from it about a month ago, and a couple of weeks ago I lost the antenna, which fell off somewhere without my noticing. The chipped paint and smudged icons on the buttons? That&#8217;s the result of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,2,12],"tags":[22,36],"class_list":["post-140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","category-rantsraves","category-reviews","tag-palm-os","tag-phones"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}