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January 12, 2008

I Have Left Verizon and Palm

I call this: phones — Posted by KP @ 12:25 pm

One thing I haven’t mentioned because of all the time I spent working and blogging about Frankenstein, is that I have had a major shift in my telecommunications life.

To recap:

  • I have been a Palm user since 2000 (my first Palm phone was the Treo 650 in 2005)
  • I had AT&T from 1997-2003 and HATED it — couldn’t make calls indoors
  • I switched to Verizon and despite hating their policy of crippling all the good features out of their phones, their reception is pretty much perfect in NYC.
  • I am a Mac user and as such am opposed to Windows Mobile for both philosophical and logistical reasons.

Then this happened:

  • As I excitedly blogged in May, Palm released the Treo 755p for Sprint. My Treo 650 at that time was dying.
  • Verizon was rumored to be releasing it in July, then it failed testing
  • I bought a 700p and extended my contract because I seriously needed a new phone
  • I was one of the first people to get the maintenance release for the 700p that supposedly fixed it. This blog made PalmInfocenter, which I thought was the coolest thing in the world, despite being labled a “he.”
  • The Maintenance release turns out to have some horrible bugs, and a relatively minor one which causes the phone to randomly make audible DTMF tones even when silenced.
  • After way too much time they release another fix which still doesn’t fix the DTMF bug (which I was able to notice within 30 seconds of buying the phone). It turns out the 755p also has the bug.
  • At this point I give up on Palm OS.
  • Months go by, the 755p continues to not be released, and the 700p continues to be buggy.
  • Palm announces that their next generation OS is at least 12-18 months away.
  • Verizon is rumored to be soon releasing the HTC XV-6800, known as the Mogul on Sprint. This is a Windows Mobile 6 device. By now (September) I’ve decided to turn to the dark side for multitasking and a modern OS. Meanwhile AT&T is about to release the Tilt (aka HTC Kaiser), which is the next generation version of the 6800.
  • The 6800 fails testing. AT&T announces the Tilt release for October 5.
  • October 5, I call all over town before I find an AT&T store with one in stock and jump in a cab on my lunch break.
  • I try out the Tilt for a month and decide to keep it and cancel my Verizon account, with 20 months left in my contract.

So my AT&T experience has been quite good. Reception is definitely not as good as Verizon’s, but it’s the difference between being able to make a call from the basement of a basement behind a cinderblock wall or not. My usage has shifted a lot in the last few years, too. I use my phone far more for data than for voice, and I find AT&T’s 3G and HSDPA networks to be very fast. Overall my Tilt accesses the internet much faster than my Treo, which is probably more to do with the phone’s hardware and software than the network, but the important thing is that it’s faster.

I’ll be posting more details about this whole experience in the future, specifically from the perspective of someone moving from Palm OS to Windows Mobile.


July 5, 2007

Missing Sync Replacement Icon Set

I call this: mac,phones — Posted by KP @ 10:10 pm

Missing Sync is pretty much the only decent way to sync various PDAs with Macs these days. The Palm version just recently moved to version 6.0. Along with a bunch of exciting improvements came one incredibly ugly set of new icons that one would be unlikely to recognize as having anything to do with Palms. See here:

Color icons in the menu bar?! Are they crazy? Not to mention that a bumpy orange ball saying “Pa” is not the most intuitive abbreviation for the Palm logo.

I got really sick of this really fast, so as soon as I had a moment I set about designing new icons so I didn’t have to look at that mess. At first I intended it only to preserve my own sanity, but then decided that perhaps the rest of the world could use an alternative as well. Because the MS icons are interactive, both in the dock and in the menu bar, it’s more complicated than replacing your normal OS X application icon. It requires going inside the app file itself and replacing various .icns files contained within the package. Fortunately I’ve gone through most of the trouble myself so with a little clicking and dragging you can replace your icons.

This is my icon set:
For the main application icon you have your choice of a variety of Treo models and colors (I think I got all of them starting with the 650).

Here you can see the various states of the menu bar, and what the dock icon looks like with the little sync progress bar over it.

Installing the Files

If you want to be safe I’d suggest before replacing any files to drag the old ones to a folder somewhere where you can keep them if you have a problem, or if you really like orange balls that say “Pa” and want to go back to them.

  • First download the file MSicons.zip and unzip it.
  • In the folder “App Icons” you will find many subfolders with the names of various Treo models. Find the one you want, and inside will be the file missingsync.icns with the image of that Treo.
  • Find your Missing Sync application file (by default it should be in /Applications/Missing Sync for Palm OS — I assume it’s similarly named if you have the Windows Mobile version and want to apply these icons)
  • Right-click on the app and select “Show Package Contents.” This will pop up a new window where you can see the files within the application.
  • navigate through Contents/Resources and inside the Resources folder you’ll see lots of icons. This is where you drop your missingsync.icns file to replace the app’s icon. It will ask if you want to replace the file, and you can just say yes, or remove the old one first if you want to keep it somewhere safe.
  • Back up one folder and you will see in the Contents folder another called SharedSupport. This contains little mini-apps that do various things.
  • Right click on “Missing Sync Menu Bar” and select “Show Package Contents”
  • Again go through the “Contents” folder to “Resources,” where you will find another bunch of icons.
  • In the zip file you downloaded is a folder called “Menu Bar” with five files. Those five files get dragged into the Resources folder to replace the menu bar icons. Again, either agree to replace, or pull out the old ones first.
  • You can now close any windows you have open and you will be ready to go. Logging out is the simplest way to see the changes applied.

Hope you enjoy the icons. Please let me know if I’ve left out your favorite Palm.


July 4, 2007

I am the Chosen One

I call this: phones — Posted by KP @ 6:41 pm
UPDATE A major bug has surfaced in the Verizon MR (which apparently is also in the Sprint MR). The data connection will not work when the phone is in a regular 1X data area, instead of the faster EVDO connection which is now available in some parts of the country. I can’t even conceive of how a bug like this got through, and I’m not sure if everyone has it, but please consider that before you go running off begging Verizon to give you the upgrade. If you’d like to learn more, the TreoCentral forum for the 700p has several threads discussing it and other advantages and disadvantages of the MR, but this one seems to be the most directly related.

There’s a developing situation in the Treo world centering around the maintenance release (MR) for the Treo 700p.

A brief background:

The 700p was released by Palm over a year ago, and from the start has had a number of bugs, enough to actually make it notable above the normal amount of bugs of any Palm device. The biggest one is what is usually simply referred to as “the lag.” Instead of the normal immediate response that Palms are known for (and that makes the limitations of the Palm OS justifiable), the 700p was known for taking several seconds (or much more) to switch between apps or do various things. Some people were very much up in arms that the lag makes it skip when playing MP3s in the background. There is also something apparently wrong with the Bluetooth stack which makes it difficult for the phone to hold a connection with another device.

Cut to far too late:
Palm announces they are finally going to provide a maintenance release (not just a patch, sort of like a Service Pack is to Windows) that supposedly will fix all that ails the 700p, as well as adding a couple enhancements. Much fanfare was made when the MR was released for Sprint back on June 4. Of course the Verizon people were bitching that their version was not released simultaneously, which just poured salt in the wound of Sprint having released the Treo 755p first, also supposedly containing the same improvements. So the Sprint people had two options for a better Treo, Verizon users were still stuck with the buggy 700p.

Things evened out a bit more when after a few days it became clear that there was something wrong with Sprint’s MR. Instead of being a simple patch added to the phone’s RAM, the MR is a permanent upgrade to the ROM, which leaves open the possibility of the phone turning into a brick if something goes wrong during the upgrade. A lot of users were experiencing problems, either with bricked phones or the update failing to apply properly, and Sprint pulled the upgrade. Sprint then re-released the MR on June 21, which seems to be better at installing itself.

Verizon drags their feet
With this whole saga apparently resolved on Sprint (despite some new bugs that have arisen with the MR), Verizon users still have not heard a peep about either the fix for the 700p or the release of the 755p. So when I heard the rumor that the 755p was going to be delayed at least 6-8 more weeks, I decided I had to buy a 700p, even though I have a major aversion to paying for something that’s already obsolete. My Treo 650 first of all had a talk time of less than 3 minutes from a full charge, and besides that was acting even more buggy and losing more data than even a 650 has any right to. And I was getting tired of the slow data connection, especially given that I pay Verizon $45/mo. for data, regardless of whether I’m getting dial-up speeds or broadband. I was a little worried about the fact that I would be getting a phone without the MR, but since people have at least been living with their 700p’s, albeit unhappily, I decided it was OK.

Buying the 700p

So after kicking around some ideas, I decided that since the 700 is not that different from the 755, I should just get on with my life and enjoy the improvement over my 650. Plus, it would keep me from doing something stupid like jumping on the iPhone too early. So I called up a nearby Verizon store and asked if they had any. The guy I spoke to had to look it up, then said, “Yeah, I’ve got a couple.” He took my phone number and said he would get it set up for me to pick up.

When I arrived I was thankfully able to skip past the line of people waiting for service, and we talked a bit about my plan and I made some adjustments from my last contract. Then when everything was confirmed he passed my phone off to be activated, for which there was a bit of a line, so I amused myself looking at all the other PDAs that I had been considering switching to.

I found it kind of odd that they didn’t actually have the 700p on display. They had the 700wx, which is the Windows Mobile version, as well as several Blackberries, the Motorola Q, and the VX6700, which is soon to be replaced by the more stylish 6800. I have never owned a non-Palm smartphone, and have often wondered if perhaps I might like a less antiquated OS, but having so much free time to try all of them out, I was unimpressed. I’m sure if I owned them I would be customizing them more to my way of working, but the general feel of them was kind of nauseating. Anyway, it made me feel better about sticking with Palm. But I did wonder, as I watched salespeople showing customers around, how they were even supposed to know the 700p was available.

Finally my name came up on the list and I paid for the phone and signed my contract. However, when the rep tried to activate the phone, it started a reset loop. He showed me and I played with it while they brought out another one and went through the process of marking it as DOA. After completing digitizer calibration, the Verizon Wireless splash screen would come up and the phone would promptly reset.

The second phone they brought out started doing the same thing, so a tech was called out to look at it. He explained that they had just installed new software on all the phones and maybe the upgrades had failed on a few. I was surprised at this, because I like to think I have my finger on the pulse of the Treo world, especially given how desperately I was waiting for the release of the 755p. I asked if this was the big update Palm was releasing, because I didn’t think it was out yet. He said they had just gotten it in the day before (which would have been July 1), and he had spent the day updating each of the phones in their stock. I believe he said he did 40 of them.

Of course I was very happy to hear I would be getting the MR, but I was still perplexed at how I could have missed hearing of this huge development. When I got home and checked TreoCentral, I read a thread which said something like “some people say they’ve gotten the MR,” without a link to who these statements. So I chimed in that I had just bought a 700p and was told it had the MR. I asked what version numbers I should be looking for, and was told software version 1.10, and Bluetooth version 3.1.2 were the big indicators, as well as a new feature where you hold the home button and it pops up a list of recently used apps. My phone has all these things. A number of posters contacted Verizon, either the main customer service, calling local stores, or by e-mail, and were all told the MR has not been released to the public, is not available for upgrade in stores, and is not being sold on new units in stores. It was at this point that I took the above picture of my phone’s info screen and posted it.

I’m not sure who these other people are who claim to also have the MR, but they’ve remained silent on all the threads I’m following, and I haven’t seen links to any of these claims. All I know is I seem to be the only person in the Treo community who has it, and I’m not sure if I should feel lucky to be The Chosen One, or scared that my phone is running software Verizon swears up and down doesn’t exist.

Other notes:

The Sprint MR’s most apparent flaw is referred to as the “DTMF tone issue.” What happens is that when you perform certain actions that elicit a sound, like a beep when you click on something, simultaneously with the beep coming from the phone’s rear speaker, you will hear a sound from the earpiece that is the same tone you would hear when pushing the * key on a phone. As soon as I began using my 700p I noticed this, and being unfamiliar with the 700p, I figured I must have something set wrong in my system sounds or something. When I got home I found this thread, where I realized all the Sprint users were complaining about this on their MR. Just for the record, I would like to point out:

  • This update comes over a year after the phone was released
  • Palm has had ample time to test this update
  • Sprint has done their own tests to ensure it operates correctly on their network
  • Verizon has taken their notoriously sweet time with their extra “quality assurance”
  • NONE OF THEM NOTICED SOMETHING THAT YOU CAN HEAR WITHIN SECONDS OF USING THE PHONE

As it turns out, the quick and dirty fix seems to be turning off system sounds altogether, which sucks if you like system sounds. Personally I keep them on because it’s a good reminder if I’ve forgotten to put my phone on silent, I will notice right away that I hear beeps when I tap on things. But for now I’m OK going without. I do hear the tone still when setting ringtones — if I tap on a sound in the list it will first play the DTMF tone through the earpiece, then the sound through the speaker. It’s also heard when that sound is played as an alarm (and presumably for calls as well). The sound doesn’t play every time a system sound plays, but one method that’s been discovered to be reliable is to go to the phone app and press spacebar. I would like to point out that this even happens if your phone is on silent (probably because silent mode doesn’t affect things coming out of the phone’s earpiece).

OK, a little annoying, right? But here’s the kicker: it really is a DTMF tone, and as such, will send a “*” to your phone whenever it plays. Some people have reported being on phone calls and having it do things, like deleting their voicemail while they were listening to it. NOT GOOD, PALM. NOT GOOD.

Why am I so blessed among all the millions of Verizon customers to be the only one with this obviously carefully tested piece of software? I don’t know. But there are many people trying to find out, and I will keep updating as the situation progresses.

Additional Reading:


July 2, 2007

Treo 700p and my first time touching an iPhone

I call this: phones — Posted by KP @ 8:19 pm

As you may know, for the last several months I’ve had my eye on the Treo 755p, which came out for Sprint in May, and has been reportedly on its way to Verizon by July. Well despite rumors of a July 4 release, there’s been no word on it, and today I read this post on TreoCentral claiming it failed its testing and will suffer further delays. My Treo 650’s talk time is now down under 3 minutes from a full charge, and I’m getting sick of how out of date it is, especially since everyone’s complaining about how slow the iPhone’s data connection is, while it’s several times faster than my Treo. In order to remind myself why I don’t have an iPhone, I must have a device that is faster. So I weighed my options (everything from getting an iPhone just to spite Verizon, to a Windows Mobile device, to a $40 battery for the 650.) I decided to suck it up and do the logical thing — get the 700p, which is exactly the same as the 755p except without the slick new form factor. I even get to keep my current SD card instead of having to buy a Mini-SD.

So I called up a nearby Verizon store and had them hold one for me. It took over an hour to get it, as they were quite crowded, and then they had some problems activating it. Unbeknownst to me, the long-awaited 700p maintenance release (read: Palm released a buggy phone a year ago and has just gotten around to patching it) just came out for Verizon yesterday. I hadn’t heard anything about it on the internet, which really surprised me when the technician came out and explained that he had just installed the patch on all the Treos in their stock and it had probably patched badly or something. After some time he got one working and I went home.

I also decided to go ahead with the purchase because I actually wanted to renew my contract with the Evil Empire. My current plan is very expensive ($124/mo.), and I wanted to scale it down and add basic text messaging. I didn’t realize until I got there and talked to the rep that in the two years I’ve had my plan they’ve actually come up with a cheaper one (imagine that!), because there’s a phone+data plan now, which saves you $5. At the time I last renewed there was no such combo package. So I saved $5 on the combo (which I promptly spent on the TXT plan), and I also reduced from 900 minutes to 450. I will have to keep an eye on that to make sure it’s enough. When I’m really busy my usage can get up to 500, so I’ll have to be smart about it. Ever since my parents got Macs and broadband, we use iChat instead of the phone, so that has probably reduced my usage by 100-200 minutes alone.

I feel like a cassette tape user describing to you the wonders of the CD player, so I’m not going to go into any details about what’s special about the 700p, at least until I’ve used it some more. To me it’s a nice upgrade, though.

While I was waiting for my turn to have my phone activated, I had a lot of time to kill in the store, so I played with all the other smartphones that I had considered getting. To cut to the chase, all of them sucked. No question, I didn’t want any of them, and once I tried them, I had no regrets about going with the 700p. I’ve never owned a Windows Mobile device, and have always wondered if perhaps I was missing something. When a friend will let me play with their phone I try to get a feel for it, but there’s little you can mess around with without screwing up your friend’s phone. A store display model is much easier to work with. I’m sure there are ways of customizing them, but neither the Blackberry or WinMobile UIs appealed to me at all. I’m sick to death of Palm OS, but I didn’t find the others very usable.

When I arrived at the mall, I thought, “Oh cool, when I’m done I can go to the Apple Store and look at the iPhone.” Then I decided perhaps it would be a better idea to look at the iPhone before buying the Treo, just in case the Apple Reality Distortion Field really was that strong. Well, obviously I made it out of the store, but I can’t say I did it with confidence. I think I was shaking a little. God, it’s pretty. If it wasn’t for my strong distrust of AT&T, I’d have overlooked all the phone’s other flaws and walked out of the store with one.

In brief, I found the touchscreen to be a little difficult. Every device responds best to a different amount of pressure, I’ve learned this from all my years with Palm, so maybe it was just that adjustment, but I found it sometimes didn’t respond right away, or in exactly the way I touched it. When viewing web pages I sometimes had to poke at it multiple times to get it to click on a link. Everyone is saying “trust the keyboard.” I found this to be true. When using it in portrait, I made quite a few mistakes, but the software correctly predicted what I was trying to type. I’ve heard in landscape mode it’s more accurate because the keyboard is a little bigger. I didn’t spend much time trying it that way. Overall, I agree with the general consensus online, it’s an amazing piece of work. The screen is beautiful, and the design makes you just want to keep using it. I am more than ever looking forward to seeing what the next version can do.


May 29, 2007

First Rehearsal

I call this: phones,summer stock,theatre — Posted by KP @ 10:33 pm

My day started with a meeting at the theatre with my ASM, Paul, and our prop master, Justin. After stopping into the office and saying hi to a bunch of people, and then arriving on stage and saying hi to a bunch more people, I sat down in the shop with Paul and Justin and went over the props we would need for the day’s rehearsal. The prop master of the previous production left us a very helpful list, and between that, our scripts, and the archival video, we came up with a list for the day and set out in search of the pieces. Not everything has been unpacked yet, so it took a little longer than we had hoped. I took what I could fit in my car and headed for rehearsal, and Paul and Justin arrived a little later with the large pieces.

The afternoon consisted of rehearsal with the three leads, who moved quickly through their material. Most of the cast has done the show before (some many times), so the whole process should be faster than normal. After dinner we had the full company present, minus a few who had conflicts. We had a little meet-and-greet, and then rehearsed the two numbers sung by the whole company. After that some folks were sent home, and we split into two rooms — the girls upstairs to learn choreography for “All I Do,” and several scenes and songs with the principals downstairs.

Then that part of my day ended at 10:30, and I began the final part, at home. First, the rehearsal report, which I start writing during rehearsal if possible, adding things as they come up, and then finish and send when I get home. Tonight I had to finish the contact sheet — Paul and I didn’t get to do our magical instant-contact-sheet production because we were at the alternate studio where there’s no copier. I decided there was no need to kill ourselves trying to get a contact sheet out as long as we had the wallet cards done so people would have all the essential numbers if they had a problem overnight. The wallet cards deserve their own post, sometime when it’s not 2AM. Then I did a rough calendar of the entire production so people have an idea of when they will be needed.

Finally, I did what is obviously the most important thing when starting a new production at Reagle — it must be because not five hours after the start of the season, I had been asked by at least three people about it — “When am I getting my Singin’ in the Rain ringtone?” Since my first show here, I have made MP3 ringtones for every show, and assigned them (using the Palm app mRing) to my Reagle category, so whenever someone from Reagle calls me it plays the ringtone for the current show. Most newer phones have the ability to play MP3s, and assign them to individuals and/or groups, although the method varies. As more people have been getting phones with this feature, and showing it off to others around the theatre, I have been getting more requests of “I hear you can give me a ringtone…” So tonight I spent a few minutes and made the glaringly obvious one — it goes “I’m singin’ in the rain / Just singin’ in the rain / what a glorious feelin’ / I’m happy again.” Generally I choose the selection so that it makes some sort of musical sense when it loops. I used to let them go for around 30 seconds, but I found that some phones had more difficulty with larger file sizes, so I’ve started making them smaller when it works well musically. I usually start with the most memorable musical phrase in the show, since I know it will be satisfactory to most people, and then will make alternate ringtones by special request, or if there’s something else I’d personally like to use. I haven’t received any requests for a specific piece of music for this show yet. I suspect “Good Morning” may be a popular one. It would actually make a very good alarm, which is the other thing I use my ringtones for.

So with that, my most important job as PSM complete, I go to bed.


May 21, 2007

Initiate, and the Visor Edge

I call this: phones — Posted by KP @ 11:29 am

I’ve recently made the switch to using Initiate as the launcher on my Treo, after what seems like an eternity of using ZLauncher. ZL is still a great and mature app, but not as Treo-aware, and the developers seem to have lost interest. Rob over at Hobbyist Software is always writing and updating new apps, so I decided to try for about the umpteenth time to switch to Initiate. This time it worked. I’m really bummed now that I passed on an offer to be a beta tester for Initiate v. 3.0, because a few months ago I didn’t think I had the time commitment to properly test an app I don’t normally use (and never liked very much when I tried). Now that it’s my regular launcher I wish I was in on that –version 3 sounds like it’s going to fix a lot of things I still miss about ZLauncher.

One of the remaining things that bugs me about Initiate is that it has this feature called “smart search,” which lets you type in any letters that appear in the name of the file or contact you’re looking for, as long as they’re in the right order. The example given in the documentation is that if you wanted to launch Filez, you could type FZ and be pretty sure nothing else would come up. This feature kind of came up in a thread on the Hobbyist forums, where a poster used the example of Albert Einstein to illustrate how v. 3 will underline the letters in the name you typed.

I took this opportunity to add my two cents about the smart search feature, and how I felt that if it was really smart, when I typed “AL(space)EI” that the first result should be Albert Einstein and not Alan Wasser Associates.

I then went on a little tangent about this little-known, and probably not-remembered-by-anyone-but-me app that used to be on the Handspring Visor Edge.

First, a word about the EdgeIf you came to PDAs after about 2001, you may not have ever heard of the Edge. It’s probably for the best that you haven’t, as it had this horrible tendency to freeze so bad that you had to wait for the battery to die, at which point you’ve lost all your data back in the days when there were no external memory cards to restore from. This was a somewhat common problem reported on the forums of the day, and it happened to me two or three times. The last time, I was in my first hour of a two-show day (at Les Miz of all things) — so approximately 12 hours before I could get home to my computer and sync, when the thing crashed. So I had no access to my calendar or contacts for that entire day. The next day I bought a Palm 500m, which I still think for its day was the greatest PDA ever made.

But the Edge, while flawed and suffering from design decisions that can kindly be called “interesting,” was really beautiful in some ways. It was thin, (thus the name). Maybe still the thinnest ever, as seen here measured in metric BreathSaver-widths:

It was made of aluminum when most if not all PDAs were plastic. Due to the thinness, the stylus was not in a silo but clipped into these little slots on the side. The main problem with this was that the stylus was heavy and some ridiculous shape that was not really comfortable to use, and no 3rd-party stylus manufacturers even attempted to make a better one, although Handspring eventually came up with a pen stylus themselves that was better.

The protective cover was a good idea, but it couldn’t flip all the way around to the back, so it always looked like something between a tricorder and a metal notepad.

It was removable, and I usually carried my Edge without it in a leather case, which of course even empty was thicker than the Edge itself, defeating the whole purpose. The Edge came in three colors: silver, and red and blue which were only available online. I still think the red one of the sexiest PDAs to look at. Even the hotsync cradle was thin and artistically designed. In the end it was not a very good PDA, but it was a brave attempt at something groundbreaking, which was what Handspring excelled at for a while — in fact to this day when millions of us use Treos it’s really their product — but this particular idea turned out to be a really bad one.

But about this Address app…
Among the metal case and thin profile and crashing, most people lost sight of this little add-on to the standard Palm contacts app (then called Address). If you were in the regular address view and pushed the Up key, it would take you to something called Fast Lookup. Here’s the screen, with my personal phone numbers blurred. Speaking of which, those are my current contacts synced to the Edge. If software could think, I’d love to know what The Missing Sync thought when it was given a hotsync command by a Visor Edge, a handheld that predates the first version of Missing Sync by about two years.

After a series of emphatic “No”s to questions like “Would you like to sync your iTunes playlists to this handheld?,” I just synced contacts, and in one of the few benefits to Palm not having updated their OS significantly since the dawn of time, it worked well enough, although it seems to have mapped some of the numbers to the wrong description (e-mail addresses show up as “home”).

Fast Lookup was designed to allow you to look up a contact by first and last name simultaneously. Basically it assigned the left two hard buttons to the last name, the right two to the first name. If the first letter of the last name was between A-L, you hit button 1, if it was between M-Z you hit button 2. Same deal with buttons 3 and 4 for the first name. If that didn’t return your result you would move on to the second letter, and so on, working independently on each name.

As you can see in this picture mid-search, I am narrowing down my contacts, and there are dots on the bottom showing how many letters of each name I have already entered.

It usually only took a few presses to narrow it down to the result, from what I remember, but upon trying it right now I am doing horribly, and I’m having to spell out almost the entire name to get it down to the right person. I remember being pretty good at it at the time, though. Maybe because I had a few hundred less contacts back then (I keep everyone I’ve ever worked with).

It always amazed me, especially back in the days before PDAs had keyboards, that no one else ever tried to revive this style of contact lookup. My best guess is that Handspring may have patented it, but you’d think even then there’d be some pirated version floating around. Maybe enough people didn’t try it for a developer to get interested in it. I know at some point years ago I tried to extract the .prc file and get it to work on another PDA, and failed. Of course in hindsight, maybe it just wasn’t that good of an idea, except on a handheld where the stylus was so distasteful that you’d rather be pushing those four buttons for five minutes instead of writing a few simple letters.

In conclusion, I’m glad we’ve moved on from the days of the Visor Edge, but I still haven’t quite found the perfect contact-searching app.


May 12, 2007

Treo 755p released for Sprint

I call this: computers,mac,phones — Posted by KP @ 8:39 am

The new excitement in my life is the announcement of the Treo 755p smartphone from Sprint. Now I’m not a Sprint customer and never have been or in all likelihood ever will be, but what’s exciting here is that Sprint and Verizon both use CDMA for their phones, which means they usually wind up with the same hardware sooner or later. The phone is very similar to the 700p, but a little smaller and with an internal antenna. It also uses Mini-SD instead of a regular SD card, which has many people up in arms, but I don’t really mind, since I’ve always been too cheap to buy an SD card for my camera, and take the one out of my Treo whenever I want to take a picture. At least now the camera can have the dignity of its own memory card. The phone also comes in two colors, midnight blue and burgundy. Colors are often different between providers, but I hope Verizon has similarly attractive options.

Although Verizon has not officially announced the phone, a thread on the very good TreoCentral forums contains a report of a completely unofficial claim by a Verizon rep that it’s in beta now and is scheduled for release in July. Oh looky-there, my contract is up at the end of June, how convenient.

I was actually planning not to renew and stick with my Treo 650 month-to-month until things with the iPhone shake out, but more and more I think the iPhone is a bad idea for me, given how my phone is my only phone for personal and business use, the iPhone is new and unproven on basic things like battery life, reception and availability of software, and I don’t trust AT&T/Cingular’s coverage in NYC. On top of that I will be in Massachusetts until the end of August and in no position to judge call quality in NYC for several months. So right now my plan is to get a 755p as soon as it’s released, which will be a big improvement over my 650, and I will probably not be tempted to get an iPhone until their second version.

And on a somewhat unrelated note, rumors are flying about the release of new Macbook Pros coming up with LED-backlit screens, probably in June at the Worldwide Developers’ Conference (WWDC), which would be June 11. Now that I finally have the money saved up, it looks like it’s going to be a very exciting summer for me, after a long two years of not upgrading any of the computer-like devices in my life.