Trēo 650 Overview

After 2 years of service, Verizon was kind enough to give me $100 off a new phone which I used to get a Trēo 650. It is a lot like the old Palm III I used to use back in the day to stay organized in school.

The Bluetooth syncing was a bit of a hassle to get set up. The “Transport Monitor” application on my Mac kept throwing up a dialog that said “Your request could not be completed. (16)” As it turns out you have to go into Bluetooth in the System Preferences and turn on “Bluetooth-PDA-Sync” in the “Sharing” tab. It ships turned off generally.

The free GraffitiAnywhere program let’s me get back to using Graffiti on screen for some of my writing which can sometimes be easier than thumbing the tiny keyboard on the device.

I’ve hidden away the “WirelessSync” tool that Verizon bundles, since some people suggest that it breaks the ability to sync normally. The Versamail install that comes on the CD-ROM but not on the device is vastly superior to the Mail program that is on the device. I have to guess that Verizon hides it on the CD to try and keep users from sending pictures via email rather than paying 25¢ an image to send them via SMS/MMS.

Working with some of the other contributors to Typo the free and open-source Vagablog Palm/Treo program. Just set it for “Blogger.com” mode and the Title and Category fields will do the right things.

I did manage to lock my Trēo up while playing around with the Adobe PDF for Palm translator. Somehow it managed to make an input PDF file double the size of the original and it filled up the device memory. This led to endless rebooting sadness. A hard reset of the device resolved matters after I got it limped far enough to delete the offending file.