Palm OS Treos Gone?
Oh no! I love my Treo. Let me just get that out of the way. Part of the reason that I love it is that the Palm OS really integrates well with a phone type device. It is simple to use, does what I need it to when I need it to. Access to the important apps: calendar, passwords, address book, and mail are trivial. The mail program works well and as expected. The phone integration is incredible. SMS messaging is awesome. The little sprint addons can be annoying, but each service provider has their little quirks. But now it looks like the Treo is going to be moving away from the palm OS (and moving to Windows Mobile.) I would find that pretty depressing for a number of reasons.
First is that I find their phone integration to be clunky at best. I don’t know how many of those issues are application/integration based and how many are OS based, so perhaps Palm doing it would be better than other vendors, but I am still thinking that this is going to be bad in the long run. It really comes down to ease of use, and what I am using my phone for. Do I really need windows media player on a device that only has 32 Megs of memory?
Second, I worry about mac integration. Sure, Palm gave up on mac support a while ago, however thanks to Mark/Space and recent innovations in sync in Mac OS X, everything syncs up quite nicely. I am sure that he will come up with a working solution of the newer models of Windows Mobile as well, however the integration has been there for a long time for the palm, and the windows syncing is much much newer. It just seems like being required to rely on a third party vendor to hook your phone to your computer is lame.
Oh well, at least my current phone is pretty new, so I should be able to look forward to years of use before I have to give it up. And by then Mark/Space will probably have a good version of his Windows Mobile sync app, and the fact of the matter is, since I no longer use Palm Desktop, everything syncs with the standard Mac apps anyway, so the upgrade path should be trivial.
I guess when it comes down to it I just always morn the loss of diversity.
I am sad. I use Verizon’s software and PalmOs on my Treo and I have no problem syncing. Of course, my company is
pushing a Windows Mobile-based initiative for smartphones, and I can’t get work email from Exchange on the phone unless I
want to let Outlook overwrite everything… sigh.
I don’t want to convert over all my contacts, either.
@erin
If your company is using Good(tm) then it doesn’t over-write the default mail client or contacts but maintains it’s own databases. I love my treo so much, but I have to confess it’s more about the physical form factors then about palmos these days.
The outlook solutions all seem to want to take over everything. I like to keep my work and personal contacts separate, but that just doesn’t seem really possible with most of the current solutions, and certainly not if you are using outlook.
OTOH, you do get some pretty cool features for giving up some data freedom.