PalmOne Treo 600
I have been using the PalmOne Treo 600 personally for five months and after a little fear and "growing pains" in learning the phone, it has fast become one of my favorite tools. The Treo 600 has 32 MB of ram and runs on PalmOS 5.2.1. The carrier I am using is Verizon, but most carrier have an option to use the phone. The features and functions of the phone are the same regardless of the service provider, but choose your plan carefully. I say that because this little jewel is CONSTANTLY online if you are using the data stream real-time to send and receive email, SMS and MMS messages. MMS messages were new to me when I first started using the phone. I quickly learned it's function was the same as SMS, but includes pictures, video, and sound. This only works if the recipient has multimedia capability, so forget sending a pic to that old brick phone in your closet. Sending the messages using the included camera is simple and since the unit takes decent pictures, you may be able to moblog easily
The PalmOS usually has graffiti capability so you can use short hand to type messages. The Treo, however, does not use graffiti. It has a qwerty keyboard meant to be usable one-handed. I've not quite mastered that yet, but most of the other features are readily accessible one-handed. It has a great feature using the keyboard I have come to rely on constantly. It automatically capitalizes after periods, adds apostrophes in the appropriate places, and auto correct some simple spelling mistakes. It's a good thing it does this too, since to get a symbol or punctuation mark requires two or more keys to be pressed. The good news is, the shift and symbol keys are sticky, so you should have no problems.
The centerpiece of the phone is, well, the phone. The phone software on the Treo 600 is as fully featured as you would expect a PalmOS phone to be. You have the ability to use normal cell phone logs, however, the recent call log is one click dial-able and you can dial straight from your contacts entries. The plus there is your contacts are synced with Outlook or the Palm Desktop, which make entry a breeze. No more entering contacts on a little keyboard. You also have the option of using an onscreen dial pad, or the keyboard, which converts to a numeric pad in phone mode.
There are many other features which would sell the phone individually, but when taken together make the phone a must have. With the release of the Treo 650, many carriers are dropping their price on this phone to a reasonable level so unless you need the Bluetooth and other small feature differences in the 650, I'd stick with the 600. The only complaint you'll have while answering the phone, taking pictures, sending and receiving email, SMS, and MMS messages is maybe you are TOO reachable.
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