nüvifone™. The navigation phone.
- Average user rating:
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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39 out of 45 people found this review helpful
0.5 stars
"Don't switch from a Blackberry to a Treo"
Pros: cool to look at
Cons: Buggiest thing I've ever used. Worse than Windows 3.1
Summary: Overall
First, let me say that this phone is potentially fantastic. I say "potentially", because there are some major flaws that prevent me from recommending this phone. If PalmOne fixes them in the future, I'd wholeheartedly recommend this. Until then, this phone is strictly for the technical gadget lover who can tolerate buggy life on the bleeding edge.
Random Reboots Turn the Phone Off
The phone sometimes reboots by itself, without any human interaction. Yep, it might just be sitting there on your desk and it might just decide to reboot. Now that might not sound so bad, but if you don't see it during the reboot, there's no obvious indication afterwards that this has happened. The user may never know that the phone rebooted. To make matters worse, the phone reboots to a mode where the PDA function is ON but phone section is OFF. So you might be using it to look up appointments and such and if you're not attentive, you might miss the fact that the phone is OFF. While the phone is OFF, incoming calls go directly to voicemail, and since the phone is OFF, you won't get any notifications that you have a voicemail. This makes for a very dangerous situation for a business professional relying on the Treo 650 as a communication device.
Random Phone Shutdowns
Sometimes, the phone doesn't reboot by itself, but it does seem to randomly shutdown or set the phone section to OFF. This situation seems to occur in marginal Sprint PCS service areas where the phone is switching often between a Sprint PCS tower and a Verizon tower.
So just as with the random reboots, you might be using it to look up appointments and such and if you're not attentive, you might miss the fact that the phone is OFF. While the phone is OFF, incoming calls go directly to voicemail, and since the phone is OFF, you won't get any notifications that you have a voicemail. Again, this makes for a very dangerous situation for a business professional relying on the Treo 650 as a communication device.
Aggrevating Email
Versamail is a very buggy application. If you get any reasonable volume of email, like 10 or more a day, I guarantee it will reboot at least once every two days. When Versamail crashes, the phone reboots and ALL Versamail email settings including logins, passwords, settings, all emails that were stored on the phone, etc. If you're on the road away from your computer, this not the happiest of situations. You can re-enter all the settings back into the Treo 650, but it's quite tedious, and in most cases you'll wait to get back to your PC where a hotsync restores most Versamail settings. However, there are some settings that still need to be re-entered in to the Treo to get it back to it's original email condition.
Remember that a Versamail crash reboots the whole Treo 650 and as I've mentioned before, these reboots turn the phone OFF, so you won't get incoming calls or voicemail notifications until you manually turn the phone back on.
I've used blackberry's in the past, and the Palm Versamail application is promising in that it doesn't strip out any email formatting. However, as mentioned, Versamail is a horrible buggy application that may inspire you to throw your phone through the window at times when you really need an email.
Don't believe what you read in the Treo 650 forums about the "delete corrupted database" workaround. It doesn't work. It only postpones the next reboot from 2 days to maybe 4 days(after that 4th day it'll resume rebooting every 1 or 2 days again). In fact I rebuilt my phone from scratch with a brand new database via a hard reboot and the problem still existed. I even returned the phone for a 2nd Treo 650 and the 2nd one had the identical problem.
On one occassion, Versamail didn't even reboot the phone. The screen stayed brilliant white and didn't respond to any keys. Versamail locked up the phone so badly that neither a soft reboot, nor a "soft restart" (that's an undocumented Palm tech-support recommended reboot that's between a soft & hard reboot) could resusciate the phone. I had to hard-reboot, which loses all the data. Resynching with PC will restore most, but not all settings.
Blackberry email vs. Treo 650 email? Blackberry wins hands down in the email department on the sole basis of stability. Veramail is written by PalmOne themselves and it's hard to imagine that they could release something so horrid.
Headset locks the unit up
There's more to this instability story. Today I plugged in my Treo 650 handsfree and the phone just plain gave up the ghost, or at least for a few minutes it did. It didn't reboot by itself, but it just lay there like it had a heart attack. It didn't respond to any buttons. I had to soft reboot it to make it come back to life. No settings were lost.
Phone Performance
Phone performance was ok with Sprint PCS. I can say OK because I compared it to the Sanyo VM4500 which always has 2 bars more reception than the Treo 650. In the New Jersey / New York area, Sprint PCS coverage is far better than T-Mobile, but not as good as Cingular or Verizon. The handsfree sound quality was great (far superior to the muffled sound of handsfree Motorola V600 or handsfree Ericsson T68i).
MP3 Player
I got around to playing some MP3's from the SD card. The music had some skipping that became quite irritating after just a few minutes. Alas, that's not the end of the bad news. The included RealPlayer will also crash the Treo650 when editing playlists. Fortunately, the resulting reboots in these situations leave the phone on.
Accessories
For a $300 to $600 device, it's quite disappointing that Treo includes practically nothing in the way of convenince with the unit. There's no carrying case, no protective case, no belt clip, and no charging/sync cradle. Blackberry's at least include a nice leatherette case/clip.
- 4 replies to this review
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When I had the Treo 600, I missed my Blackberry. I have the 650 now and I am generally pleased. I dumped VersaMail and installed Chatter, a HUGE improvement. I also have Pocket Tunes and do not use RealPlayer. This phone could still use some work (A lot more memory) but I think after a year, I would have a hard time going back to a Blackeberry.
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I too had the problem with my treo rebooting every time I would check my mail. After a brief conversation with the sprint customer service people it was determined that I just needed to download the software upgrade. No problems since.
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Hi - Thanks for your review.
I haven't had my Treo 650 very long, and the phone has turned off on me twice. Very annoying. Then I couldn't turn it back on without removing the battery & the sim card for at least a minute.
I did notice that if the green light on the front left is blinking, then the phone is on. So at least I know when the phone is on.
So far so good today.
Cindy G -
PLEASE take my advise: the stories are true, the phone has a mind of its own and just try to get help from Palm!
Most reviews only seem to give solutions that are equivalent to putting a band-aid on a severed limb. Palm blew it on this one and at $500+ per phone they are laughing all the way to the bank.
