My father has one of them Treos. I don't know which model. It does suck as a phone. It has a bit of an echo that drives me nutty.

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Considering that when pushed to pick a political leaning I tend to pick demacratic socialism I pretty much don't like the idea od K-12 privatization on principle. However I was up until three in the morning last night so I am much too tired to read the entire article through and argue the point.

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The Treo 700w may be a a terrible phone, but is there really something significantly better out there? I thought that all smartphones sucked in one way or another.

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Well, the 700w has windows mobile, and it's the first windows mobile on a palm, and so the software has lots of rough edges. I think the PalmOS palms are much smoother, and also have a 320x320 screen. Apparently windows mobile "doesn't support" screen sizes larger than 240x240. I don't even know what that means. How hard can it possibly be to support arbitrary screen sizes?!

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Maybe it was hardcoded into the OS because "56K pixels ought to be enough for anybody"

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I _love_ my palmOS Treo 650. Haven't had many problems with it as a phone. My only complaint is that I can't use it as a music player any more; dropped it too many times.

What is more high end in the smartphone market than a treo? I guess you could have a more recent treo or PPC-6700 or whatever, but you'd have to bother with moving over your contacts. Not a big cost, but maybe enough to stop someone from switching.

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Dropping the device made the music player alone stop working? That's weird :)

"What is more high end in the smartphone market than a treo?"

That's a good point, actually. Hadn't thought of that. I'd assumed that there's a whole segment of the smartphone market for super-rich people that I simply wasn't familiar with, but maybe there isn't.

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It's the little microphone/headphone jack - when I plug in my headphones, I get distorted, faint sound unless I turn the plug around and hold it just so. This happens consistently with different headphones. The plastic around it is slightly separated, so that's why I think it's due to dropping. Everything else works. I'm eligible for a full trade-in rebate in September, so I'll probably just upgrade then.

I'm a bit conflicted about whether to go for a Windows Treo or a PalmOS Treo. On the one hand, I haven't seen a good PDF solution for PalmOS, and the fact that random apps can cause my phone to enter a never ending reboot cycle sucks (AOL instant messenger client). On the other, I hate how cluttered the Windows Mobile UI is. I didn't know about the screen resolution limitation either, which is also a point against. I'll see what the scene is like in September; Windows Mobile 6 is out now, maybe by then it'll be on a Treo.

As for super-high end devices, I guess one could buy an OQO and hook it up to a GSM card or something. That way you could run XP (or maybe even Vista), have a bad phone, and pay over $2K. :)

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Unless it's a presentation converted to PDF, I have trouble buying that you can read pdfs on a handheld, even at 320x320. Have you used a pdf reader successfully on a smartphone before?

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