d bye T5/Nokia… hello Treo 680! – Part 2 – settled in and finding new toys

Posted on April 9th, 2007 by thiswayup.
Categories: Palm,PDA's and other smartphones.

Well it's been over 2 months since the first installment of this series. I have good time to settle into using my new palm toy and overal it has been good experience, alot better then I would expect coming over to the world of smart phones. Here's a quick run down on what I have been using and how I have migrated from my 2 device world.

Good apps

• Butler - Basically a helper app that adds a load of REALLY helpful functionality that the stock palm preferencses/functionality should have had. It is a culmination of the useful bits covering Alarms, Attention Grabber, Navigation, Launching, LED, Keyguard and more from Butler that makes it an essential purchase!
  I persoanlly love the alarm system which is worth the price itself. Replacing my old 2playme mp3 alarm, the feature has loads more customisation on how the alarm is executed. I myself set 4 alarms to wake me up from a combination of buzzing alarms to a mp3 playing
  Another fantastic feature is the button launcher. On my T5, I used HBX to increase from using 4 button to launch apps to 16. Granted I don't get to launch 16 apps now but I now only really use a handful of apps.
  The button lock is really useful as well. Bog standard, any button can light up the screen (but still in lock mode), this can drain your battery quite quickly. I like to set it so that non of the keyboard buttons lights up the screen, I also like the little slide to unlock 'iphone' stylee feature.
• GooSynch - I'm a big fan of using google calendar. I had been trying to find a straight up and easy way to do this. Finally gooSynch came out. The whole solution revolves around a 3rd party reading your Gcal account then forwarding the information to your palm which is initiated by a client that resides on your PDA. Only real possible down point is that you have to give them your google credentials. That and the the way it seems to screw you desktop synch which I found can be fixed by doing this.
• Shadowplan - Not completely relevant just for the Treo but a good task manager/outliner/project planner. It has some amazing features just to plan, organise ideas and can link to the Palm Task plus has a fairly decent desktop component that sunchs with the Palm. Nice. For example I like to pass by game stores and drop down in a games "to buy/rent" list or trying to organise my thoughts on the tasks for the DS gaming charity tournanment we had. Great stuff.

Going mobile!
Ofcourse the main reason for having a smartphone...mobility. Boy do I love it! Since I joined Tmobiles web and walk service ("unlimited" mobile internet - which isn't unlimited btw) and using mobile bloglines I am now completely updated on the lastest news whether I'm on the bus, train, cafe or toilet The great thing about the mobile version of bloglines is that it uses a 3rd party proy server that squeezes the page file size down to a more mobile friendly form. I also find that for pages that I may read in more detail later, I tend to use the bloglines "email" button to email the link to myself and read it later when I have more time, a bigger screen or when there is video involved. Yes, the web addiciton is now truly completely over taken me! The only thing is that the stock Blazer web brwoser software needs updating with tabs and better large page size handling (it just goves up after the first MB). So I decided to check out any other alternatives such as Universe (open source in beta).

Here's a small list of other useful mobile centric pages I have passed by:

• t-mobile.tflwap.gov.uk -tfl have a wap site which includes a journey planner! Also very handy to preempt getting caught up in Tube delays.
• o2.mytrains.kizoom.co.uk - Quicker way then the TFL to check train times
• m.gmail.com - Gmail, mobile, nuff said.
• wap2.bonfiremedia.com - Check your ebay in a simplefied form.

And the next step
Well, I say its been a mostly positive experience although I do have some things that need some further improvement. For one thing the GUI for the actual phone manager just feels clunky. Making phone calls just doesnt feel as smooth as my old nokia. I guess I just I need to find another phone manager of some sort.
Another slightly annoying feeling is the MP3 player, though Pocket tunes is great and all. I think it could improve things in its GUI plus ad faster playlist creation on the fly when listening to music, such as winamp's add to playlist feature maybe?

Upgrades!
So I am now truly rooted in my setup. Everything is on my phone and I am quite impressed with this little toy. Now that I have a 8Gb SDHC card in the thing and now use it as my main music player. Sweet. However I had to also swap out the stock battery for a high capicty 2400mAh as it was a bit crap (wouldnt last over 2 days!). Apart from the fact the arse of the phone now looks a tiny bit out of place sticking out so much, it is handy not having to keep the thing constantly on charge. One thing that does annoy me is how the battery indicator goes downs so quickly but the actual battery can last a fair while after

That's all folks
So all in all, good stuff. I have started reading a lot less books and playing DS because of my RSS addiciton on my Treo and it appears that moving over has been a good idea. No real big annoyances apart from the occasional random reset (5 times in since begin of Jan) and that sometimes there is a real lag to get the phone manager working when chaning from another app. The next thought is how now to make it even better?

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