MnGCA

Mario and Princess Peach · Posted: Wed Jun 22, 2005 6:38 am Post subject: Treo 650

My 2-yr cell phone contract is expiring and I want to get a new phone. I'm getting the Treo 650. It's a PDA phone running Palm OS. It has pretty good bluetooth compatibility, and I've heard there are lots of options for GPS add ons. Anyone here doing anything like this or have knowledge of it?

tomslusher · Geocacher Joined: 02 Jan 2003 Posts: 182

I had a buddy who had a phone/pda like that. Bad news. Let me tell you the story.

We were out ice fishing last season and he had his phone/pda with him. Because we had no snow and my 4 wheeler is a one-wheel-drive wonder, I would just spin in circles on the ice unless I had something to drag me down on the power side. I guess we had a beer or two also but when we were coming back into shore my buddy was needed to hang onto the rack and drag his feet so we could drive straight on the ice. We hit a small ice ridge or crack or something and my buddy fell flat on his side where the phone/pda was. The good news was the phone survived just fine. Bad news, cracked ribs.

So I guess If you were planning on dragging behind a 4 wheeler across the ice I would have to recommend that you don't buy that phone/pda. It's too big for that. Other than that it should be a nice phone.

tomslusher

Mario and Princess Peach · Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2005 6:09 am Post subject:

Reminds me of the time I jumped on the back of my buddies camper for a short ride down the street. He hit a bump, I went up in the air, my feet came down and stopped but my face kept going. I lost a few teeth in that bit of tom foolery.

miles58 · Geocacher Joined: 07 Mar 2005 Posts: 196

If you're planning on dragging this along caching, I wouldn't. It's an expensive thing to get broken. I have a Zire 72 that I like otherwise, it has the bluetooth and most of the other feature of the Treo.

Mario and Princess Peach · Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2005 7:39 am Post subject:

Yeah, I haven't really thought through when I would use the GPS portion with the phone. Having a GPS when I'm driving has improved my life so much that I have the urge to add GPS to everything.

sui generis · Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2005 7:43 am Post subject:

With the Treo, make sure to get a view of the screen in direct sunlight. The one I had 3 years ago was VERY hard to see. I'm sure they have come up with better tech since then, but it was something you might want to check...
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Mario and Princess Peach · Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2005 8:18 am Post subject:

Yes, I did just that (for the same concern). It was hard to find one locally I could look at, but I found an open box at Office Max over on France. Someone had returned it because they couldn't activate it for whatever reason. So, it was still charged up. I wanted to see what it felt like in my pocket, making sure it wasn't too big. They also let me take it outside to look at the display. It was a lot easier to see than my Garmin iQue M5. I love everything about the M5 except for the seeing the display in sunlight.

BvFoxy · Posted: Wed Aug 23, 2006 5:32 pm Post subject: Treo 650

I use a Treo 650 on Cingular. I'm mostly happy with the cell phone service, and very happy with the Palm OS functionality.

I use the Pocket Queries feature on Geocaching.com with mobipocket in the 650, so I can have the web site contents with me when I am out caching. That's been a big help so you don't have to try to remember all the details of the caches you browsed before taking off.

I just wrote a program for a free Basic interpreter that runs on Palm OS to do the a=1, b=2, ... z=26 arithmetic that is used all the time in puzzle caches. This will also be handy out in the field. I would be happy to share this if anyone else is interested.

BvFoxy

pfalstad · Geocacher Joined: 02 Feb 2006 Posts: 967 Location: Edina

I have a Treo 650 and I like it OK, but I am in the process of switching to a Motorola Q (which is windows-based). I love PalmOS, and the calendar/task list stuff is great, but the phone application kept crashing on me, and the web browser drives me up the wall. The lack of broadband is also a problem. It's nice that it runs cachemate.

The Motorola has a decent web browser and phone (so far), but the task list is terrible. I'm still in the process of getting used to it, and it has a bunch of annoying quirks, but I'm thinking I'll stick with it. It doesn't run cachemate, but I can use html files instead, which seems to work fine.

Marsha and Silent Bob · Past MnGCA President Joined: 02 Sep 2003 Posts: 6261

sir_zman · Posted: Thu Aug 24, 2006 8:16 am Post subject:

I also have a Treo 650 and just started to use cachemate, so far, I have really enjoyed it, and yes the GC WAP site is slow, and it crashes on me if I try to log a find, but I'm able to use it to view a cache, which is nice.

pfalstad · Geocacher Joined: 02 Feb 2006 Posts: 967 Location: Edina

GeoPierce · Posted: Thu Aug 24, 2006 10:25 am Post subject:

pfalstad · Geocacher Joined: 02 Feb 2006 Posts: 967 Location: Edina

Marsha and Silent Bob · Past MnGCA President Joined: 02 Sep 2003 Posts: 6261

I don't blame you for not wanting to switch to T-mobile. The only advantage would be to get the phone free after rebate. Other than that, generally speaking, coverage from the other providers is much better.

LOL "even for a yeti" Smile

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