Handspring Treo 300 Handheld

I had been having a running battle within my mind for a long time as to whether or not to get a PDA (Personal Data Assistant). All my experiences with PDAs up until recently were frustrating enough that I stayed with my Day-Timer paper organizer. A friend who lost her PDA with all her data further confirmed my feeling that I should just stick to good old papyrus for record keeping like we've been doing for thousands of years.

Still, there was an allure to the PDAs.

Many people I trusted had gone over to them and had been won over. There are probably several million people out there just like I was, wondering if it was just an expensive gadget you'd buy, use a month, and then cast aside, or whether it really was worth the money and worth the consequent learning curve.

I can't speak for anyone except myself, but I'd have to say that I've been completely won over.

My cellphone company is Sprint PCS, and I've been reasonably happy with them. Sprint normally gives you a clear digital signal and I've had few dropped calls. For the last 2 years I have used, mostly successful, a Motorola Timeport. But now that cellphones and PDAs are becoming integrated, I was curious to see what Sprint had to offer these days, so I went by the store.

I started looking at the Sprint-empowered/Handsping Treo 300, and was impressed enough after 45 minutes of research that I bit on the deal. And though it sent my VISA card balance on up the stratosphere, I think I got a really great stairway to techno-heaven here, folks.

It is EXTREMELY intuitive and user-friendly. You can dial your phone numbers three ways, for example, however you wish. You get 50 speed dials with NAMES so you don't have to memorize code-numbers ("Let's see, Aunt Hildagarde is number 13, right? Or is that cousin Heidi?") and as if that isn't enough, the real gold-mine is this: You can put thousands of names, addresses, and phone numbers in the address book, and a simple tap of the stylus on any of those numbers will RING UP THE PERSON'S NUMBER. In essence, you have a speed dialer that will ring 10,000 or more numbers and the names are with them so there's no memorizing. Amazing.

Sprint Telephoning is pretty cool but there is one drawback. In the good old USA Sprint only covers metropolitan areas. That means if you are traveling in a lot of rural areas you will get hit with high-blood-pressure roaming charges if you try to use a Sprintphone. Maybe some day Sprint will cover all the calling areas but for now you have to be a big-city person to make it worthwhile. You're out of luck otherwise. But if you are in Sprint Country, the Handspring Treo 300 is the best thing around, in my opinion.

There are all kinds of things I could tell you about the telephone but I have told you what I consider the best features; you can research the rest.

Now the reason it is called the TREO is because it really encompasses a "Trio" (Three; 3) main feature areas. The cellphone is just one of them. Here is a bit about the other two.

Feature area two is the PDA. It is a Palm OS, so if you know of Palms you know that they are the most widely used "platform" in the PDA world and they have gazillions of software programs for the consumer to prove it. The Treo has the standard 4 buttons on the bottom. Click one and you get your phone-dialer/address book. Click two and you get the calendar (and a wonder-filled calendar it is!) Click three and you get the internet (more about that in a minute). Click 4 and you get a gazillion memo features.

Click two other little buttons and the screen changes and another new world unfolds and you get all the applications you need. The Unit holds 16 MB of RAM, so you can put enough text for several books in there, if you wanted or you can put color photographs or other things, like games. Most people put in a version of WORD and maybe EXCELL which sync up with the WORD and EXCELL, etc. on their Desktop Computers. You can download/upload WORD documents as easy as pie these days. So if you are into amazing applications, there you have it. You can write the Great American Novel on it, or poetry, or simply write out a grocery list. It's amazing what applications you can cram into one of these.

The thing a lot of OHV (Old Hardened Veteran) PDA people will find intriguing (or maybe downright annoying, even) is the tiny QWERTY keyboard. Since I was never a script/PDA person I didn't have a problem with that. Some OHV people really do, though, and boy do they howl about it ("My fingers are just toooo big!"). But not me. As a latecomer to PDAs, I avoid the prejudices that now haunt the experienced, I suppose. And I have a fickle finger of fate that seems to work ok in this venue.

The keyboarding takes a little time but as a veteran hunt-and-pecker on the big keyboard it was easy for my fickle finger of fate to fandangle my way with this futuristic fantasmic forerunner of the future. Handspring says they aren't going back to script and until voice-recg software really takes over (if ever), the mini keyboard is the one that will make the splash with the buyers of the coming generation. Of course if you do a lot of your typing on your desktop you can just download your golden wordage into the Treo and have your cake and eat it too.

Area three is the internet area. It works, and a lot better than I expected, but it isn't thesame as you are going to see on a 5Ghz Dell Dimension Desktop with a plasma monitor. Even so, it is impressive. You can get 80% of the same effect, plus email.

The hotsync works well. You push de leetle button and da data all clicks together so that your computer backs up all your valuable info and the Treo goes out into the world to do its thing carrying all that brainpower wherever you go.

As you might imagine, the Treo is quite addictive. A few years ago Bill Gates wrote a book called THE ROAD AHEAD in which he predicted that some day we would carry around a wallet-sized device that would be a phone, an emailer, an instant messenger, a web surfer, a virtual picture album, and a PDA, etc. The Treo is probably the best unit today which goes into the mode of fulfilling Bill's prophecy of such a device. I predict that the Treo is going to set the standard for Cellphones and PDAs in the years to come.

Expensive? You said it. But think of how the powerful features in this little miracle are going to enhance your life. If you try it you'll see. The payback over the long haul will more than justify the initial outlay of big cash.

They normally run $500 US, but Sprint has them on sale for $450 right now (12/02). The Sprint plan I am on is 400 weekday daytime minutes, unlimited nighttime/weekend minutes (inside the US), plus the internet capability, all for about $50 a month.

Here is a list of all the applications features the Treo will handle for me after I have loaded a few 3rd party software programs:

01. Cell Phone (Excellent Tone) W/ Cradle Charger & Microphone/Earphone cord.
02. HUGE electronic Address Book w/ speed dial
03. Calendar w/ audible prompts
04. Internet Connection: News Weather
05. HUGE and intuitive Memo pad
06. Phone Message checker
07. To-Do List w/ prioritization
08. Calculator
09. City Time Time Zone Checker
10. Photo Album
11. Encryption Capability
12. Backup Capability w/ Computer
13. Replacement Insurance w/ Sprint ($4.00/mo.)
14. Shopping List Maker w/ Lists
15. Databases Listing Program
16. Word Processing Program that syncs w/ MS WORD
17. Street Maps Program
18. Games Capability (4 games: Chess, Solitaire, Poker & Sub Hunt)
19. E-mail Capability
20. Holy Bible On An E-book
21. Important Personal Information Datakeys

**Extra Credit: the antenna is hard, fixed, and MUCH more durable than the slide in/slide out one on my Motorola Timeport which I had to replace at Radio Shack every 6 months or so.

{All of this is in a tiny machine hardle bigger than a deck of cards}


Those are the GREAT features that will take you into the 21st century. Now for a few caveats: things I would improve if I were making the next model of the Handspring Treo:

* I would make the case out of metal instead of plastic. METAL is a lot more durable, doesn't get scratched up if you drop it (as easy as plastic), would not add all that much to the price, and it would look nicer over the long haul.

* I would make the ringer louder. It is a little TOO quiet, even on full volume, in the noisy places where a lot of us live and work.

* I would make it easier to get to email. Getting to the Internet is not real hard, but getting to your email is a serpentine process in alchemaic webology if there ever was one.

* I would give the customer/enduser a MUCH better instruction manual. The one that comes with the Treo 300 (at least from SPRINT) is extremely light and fluffy, almost like a promo manual. Lots of questions go unanswered and lots of tips are missing. For all the bucks the customer is shelling out, they should a decent manual and a support number. Tell us not only about the phone section, but all the ins and outs of the PDA section and the Internet section. Don't pass the buck on off to some web site for the customer to go to; give it to the serious money customer in hard copy at the time of the initial purchase. It's good, but it'll be mo betta that way.

* I would add the capability for memory expansion cards. The 16 MB memory is nice, but it would be good to be able to do all the things you can do with additional interchangable memory.

Now that I've lauded the Treo to the high heavens and gotten those things off my chest I see as areas for improvement, we'll see how all the fun with the Treo 300 goes from here. After a month now with the little jewel, the thrill is NOT gone, and I think it will be there for a long time to come. Take a look at this when you get a chance. It's got The Future written all over it.