Treo: Nice, but nowhere near nirvana

The challenge in adopting devices like the Treo is that they look like the answer to an executive's prayers for mobile voice and data, but it may be a can of worms to implement on the back end. As a side note, you can read my analysis of Palm's announcement this week that it would be acquiring Handspring. It covers some ground regarding choice of device from the developer's perspective that's not covered here.

Handspring's Treo is a converged device-- part personal digital assistant and part telephone, and both parts are enabled to take advantage of a wide area wireless voice/data network. The Treo 300 is available through Sprint (based on CDMA technology) and the Treo 270 is available from T-Mobile and Cingular (both based on GSM and GPRS). The carrier service is relevant because, as I have said many times before, the three most important criteria you should be considering when it comes to converged devices like the Treo are coverage, coverage, and coverage.

When it came to deciding between the Treo 300 or the 270, I selected the 300 for three reasons. First, Sprint's PCS Vision network is faster than the networks from either of the GPRS providers. Second, Sprint offered a service called Business Connection, which claims to tightly integrate a Treo out on the road with your PC back at the office. Third, when a voice package is included, the PCS Vision plan comes with all-you-can-eat data, an option for which other network providers charge a lot extra.

As a converged device, the Treo 300 could very well set the bar, but I have two disclaimers. First, the bar is set very low. We are barely crawling out of the stone age of converged devices. Second, I haven't yet tested newer converged devices from Research in Motion (RIM) that appear to resolve some of my biggest complaints about that company's first foray into the converged arena--the BlackBerry 5810. RIM just introduced the GSM/GPRS-based full color BlackBerry 7230 in Europe, and I expect that it will be available in the U.S. this summer.

Like previous converged devices, the Treo proves that it isn't easy to marry a phone to a PDA. If a converged device is going to live up to user expectations, then it better compare favorably with the dedicated devices it is replacing. As long as you're a fan of the Palm operating system, the Treo makes a good PDA for business users in terms of the types of applications that are either built-in or available from third parties. If you intend to rely on your PDA for memory-intensive applications, then the Treo's 16MB of memory with no built-in method for expansion (e.g., a slot for Secure Digital, Compact Flash or Handspring's proprietary Springboard architecture) may disappoint you. This deficiency is reflected in the Treo 300's lack of support for opening, saving, or creating e-mail attachments (without the assistance of another system or service) when using either Sprint's Business Connection or Handspring's Treo Mail. If you're using a Palm-based solution and you're going to pay for a third-party e-mail application, you'll be much better off with SnapperFish's SnapperMail, which supports attachments.

However, introducing attachments into your Treo world will result in another surprise. As you can imagine, attachments will significantly increase the amount of data that must be retrieved through the wireless network. The surprise was the amount of battery power eaten up by data operations such as e-mail and Web access. The Treo comes with a decent built-in Web browser called Blazer. When used with Sprint's CDMA 2000-based network, Blazer was surprisingly fast. Given that the Treo runs on an older version of the Palm OS, which uses a 33 MHz Motorola Dragonball Z processor, I couldn't help but wonder if it might render pages a bit faster by using one of the faster StrongARM-based processors with the 2.5G-capable network.

After first setting up the Treo in the morning, I engaged in frequent data operations (hourly e-mail downloads, news alerts, and stock look ups) only to find that, within about seven hours of being disconnected from its battery charger (approximately 3pm), the battery was fully depleted. No problem, I thought. I'll just keep a spare replacement battery with me to keep me going throughout the day. Unfortunately, reminiscent of early iPaq's and BlackBerries, the Treo 300's built-in battery is not replaceable. This might not be so bad if I weren't used to having my phone last for at least a couple of days on one charge. Unfortunately, when data communication depletes the Treo's battery, you lose voice communication as well. Keeping the Treo's phone side in business between nightly visits to a recharging cradle means backing off on the number and length of my data sessions. Not acceptable.

Not quite ready to integrate
In terms of integration with my existing environment, the Treo involves compromises that some might not be willing to make. The Treo does not come with the built-in capability to create or open Microsoft Office-compatible documents the way PocketPC-based devices do. To create or open Office documents, I had to turn to yet another third-party solution; this time iGo's $40 QuickOffice Premier.

As you might have gathered by now, Treo users have several options for sending and receiving e-mail. The Treo is advertised as an "always-on" device, which is usually taken to mean that as e-mail arrives in your inbox at the office, it is immediately pushed along to your wireless handheld. This isn't the case with the Treo 300. When using any of the e-mail retrieval methods available to the Treo, you'll need to set the frequency at which the Treo checks or polls for e-mail. (Frequency of polling is one of the tasks that affects battery life. Polling every hour was what drained my battery prematurely).

With Sprint's Business Connection and TreoMail, a PC behind your company's firewall and connected to your e-mail servers is required to act as a go-between for the e-mail servers and your device. Alternatively, you can use a corporate mail synchronization product like those from Extended Systems (a Palm subsidiary) or PumaTech (which is good if you have lots of users who need mobile e-mail and calendar access from devices like Treos). Or you can go with my solution, which is good for single-user access without the need for a go-between. Instead of leaving a PC on at my office to act as a proxy, I decided to access the Exchange servers directly via the POP3 protocol (which most e-mail servers support). However, doing so revealed another flaw in the Treo's total package--lack of a built-in virtual private networking (VPN) client to reach behind firewalls. To solve the problem, I downloaded Mergic's $30 VPN Client for Palm OS .

Overall, I can't give the PDA side of the Treo good grades on integration. I had to jump through too many hoops to get it to be where I wanted it to be.

And, as for the phone, when it comes to the software that marries the phone functionality to the PDA, RIM's implementation sets the benchmark for all others to beat. The Treo doesn't even come close.

One of the biggest advantages of converging the phone and PDA is the way in which the phone side has access to many more numbers than dedicated phones and how all those numbers are easily kept in synch with the contact data in your computer. The Treo satisfies this basic requirement, but the BlackBerry phones go much further. The BlackBerry phones track all inbound and outbound communications through a single, universal inbox. Phone calls, SMS messages, and e-mails are all intermingled with each other. Some people may not want to see all of this data crammed into a single list, but RIM's implementation of the universal inbox allows you to receive an inbound communication via one channel and respond via a different channel. If an inbound call comes in and you miss it, you can easily reply with an e-mail as long as the device can find a match in your BlackBerry contact manager for the inbound caller ID information.

The Treo lacks this functionality. The Treo's integration appears to be an afterthought when compared to how well it's done on the BlackBerry.

Handspring did make some wise industrial design decisions that RIM could learn from. For example, both the BlackBerry and Treo have a miniature phone dialing pad embedded in their thumbboards. On the BlackBerry shared keys that have both numbers and letters give more emphasis to the letters. (In other words, the letters are easier to see than the numbers). The Treo emphasizes the numbers. You'd be surprised at how important this design choice is to end users who are trying to hunt and peck the right buttons with their thumbs in order to make a phone call, especially in low light situations.

In addition, because the Treo is a Palm OS-based device, it employs a touch screen, which is missing from BlackBerry devices. The touch screen makes it possible for the device to present a dialing pad on the display so that you don't have to use the miniature thumbboard keys. As much as I tried to get used to this feature, I had problems. Since you can't feel the buttons, you can't tell if you're about to press the correct spot on the screen. This also assumes that you can see the display, which-in direct sunlight-- you can't.

I could go on about the Treo and converged devices. For example, although my Treo crashes routinely, it also survived a physical torture test that other devices might not have: left it on top of my car before driving off somewhere. When people ask me if I'd buy a Treo 300 now that I've had the opportunity to test it, my answer is, probably not. Yes, even with all of its faults, it's still one of the better converged devices available today, sharing that spotlight with the BlackBerries and, based on what some readers tell me, the Kyocera 7135 (another Palm-based device).

So far, I prefer the BlackBerry over the Treo, but given the early stage of this technology, I'll have a lot more to look forward to in the coming months and years.

Based on the e-mail I receive in response to my columns about converged devices, you'd think that I was writing about religion rather than technology. Are you a devotee of one solution or another? Use TalkBack to let your fellow ZDNet readers know what you think. Or write to me at david.berlind@cnet.com. If you're looking for my commentaries on other IT topics, check the archives.