New toy! Palm Treo 680

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.

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