This morning I picked up from the Post Office delivery centre my new smartphone, the just released Palm Treo 680. (Which meant that I had to get up at 6:25am! Blurgh.)
My thoughts so far:
Good bits relative to the Treo 600..
- Nice screen.
- Lighter and nicer looking
- Faster
- Mocha telnet works.
- The e-mail client does IMAP properly, just downloading headers and then the message body on demand.
- All the cards (SIMM & SD) are enclosed.
- Non-volative RAM so that data’s not lost when the battery runs down.
- The keyboard is far better and easier to read.
- It’s not locked to a telco and you can upload and download MIDI files and MAP3 as ringtones via USB without paying the phone company a penny.
Bad bits..
- The battery’s smaller and hence shorter life (slightly)
- I’ve found a bug which can stop the whole device from functioning.
- There’s no reset button, you have to remove the battery.
As for the bug, it looks like while the phone is hibernating the battery and signal level sub-systems are still sending screen refresh requests to the display sub-system. When you unlock it and wake the device up the UI spends a while updating and refreshing the display and it unresponsive to the touch screen or the buttons. It’s locked up a couple of times during this refresh deluge.
Still, it is definitely an improvement and only days after release so bugs aren’t a surprise really.