Time for a Palm Intervention?

Interesting article on Engadget... :)

Very interesting article, I can't tell you how many colleagues of mine I've converted to blackberries. It seems that Palm Users have completely lost faith in the company, the innovation seems to be gone, and something needs to be done. I found it to be well written and informative, whether Palm pays attention is another story . Anyways, 8820 on Sep 4th!

I've got a Curve now and it's a decent device. I use it in tandem with my treo 680. I've also got a 750v which keeps breaking down. The problem with the Curve is that it excels at multimedia and email and falls down badly on Office doc/excel stuff, lack of decent List manager type apps and a general all round lack of choice re 3rd paty apps in this area....certainly compared to the choice for palm and windows mobile. For the sort of stuff I need a device to do, the Curve is still a long way short of cutting the mustard but as a good lightweight phone with first class email and multimedia stuff, it's great.
I still use the treo for the more heavy duty pda style stuff. Palm has taken a lot of justified slagging of late for outdated devices, unreliability and various other things but once the new Linux based o/s finally sees the light of day it will blow everything else back out of the water.
I've also tried windows mobile devices for the past year or so and they are more powerful but require fairly constant tinkering which frankly, I can't be bothered with.
The Curve is my first RIM device and I can see them constantly getting better, the interface is first class, keyboard excellent and with the multitude of keyboard shortcuts scooting around the Curve is easy.

I still keep my treo 650 & palm life drive with all my documents on it, but I find the 8800 to be an excellent device. When the docs to go apps become available for the blackberry iI will definately purchase it. It would be nice to have a wide variety of 3rd party apps available for blackberry as palm. Many palm users are switching over from palm to blackberry & windows mobile due to palm keep sleeping on the new technology. They continue to miss the boat when it comes to being innovative and the tired os system! Come on man! I have been a palm user for years and the interface still look the same after all these years.

Now, I have had a chance to see how the blackberry work and would not go back! BB is it for me:cool:

I'm a long time palm user looking at the 8830. Will be trying one out on my trip to Australia next week while leaving my 700p behind. Not looking forward to having to deal with outlook to sync up all my contacts and everything, but what can you do. I'm hoping the BB fulfills my pda needs as I just can't stand the stability issues with my 700. Worst case scenario is the 8830 gets me through till when the Linux Treo comes out and my hopeful faith in Palm returns. We shall see.

Once you go Blackberry you'll never go back.

It was time for me to upgrade my Treo 680 or switch to BB. Since I am a Verizon using, the choice was easy. The only treo they had to offer still had an antenna. I really like my BB 8830. We'll see how it performs when I'm over in Asia.

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

I've been using my 8830 down under now for quite a few days and am pretty happy with it, though my 700p does get taken out when I simply have touchscreen withdrawl.

I know you'll be a bit north, but here I noticed not all gsm is created equal. Telstra and one other network didn't allow any data capability. I hopped on Yes Opus by accident and suddenly had a whirl of emails. Didn"t last long as I was soon back on Telstra. Nice thing was I could manually choose the Yes Opus network, and it's been smooth sailing since. So if you run into data connection issues, manually go through the available networks.

I also don't have SMS which is a pain. I use people's messaging adr to my email so with the push that works well for instant communication.

I also haven't found a way to get the US country code to automatically enter when dialing US numbers so I'm a bit peeved I have to modify the entries of the numbers at home I do call. Not very worldly of a world phone in that respect.

That article was right on the money. I used to own the Treo 650 and now am the proud owner of the Curve (Whew, what a phone!) and was waiting for something new and innovative from Palm and got nothing. I have watched RIM come a long way in terms of technology and really didn't want to jump ship but you know what? I'm glad I did. The Curve simply blows the Treo out of the water.

So I had the 8830 to play with for three weeks while in Australia and a week back at home in Philly. I definitely enjoyed having it, but I'm going to end up with the upcoming Palm Centro instead of going with the 8830. If I was extremely email centric, I'd stick with the BB, but I'm not. I'm more concerned with having a good PDA, and in that realm, Palm still wins. As a basic PIM, the BB does just fine. But I'm used to my 3rd party apps and all the extra features I can do with them that make contact management and scheduling that much easier. I also had the trackball down pretty well and could cut and paste rather easily. It's still easier to do editing functions with a touch screen, and killing time playing a game or two is easier with the touch screen as well.

I can do push mail if I need it, but it's been just as easy to hop on the various wap sites to check mail when I need to. I also have the option of ditching outlook and going back to the palm desktop. Since I rarely hook up my phone to the pc, having the ability to backup to a memory card is key. That's so basic, and I can't believe RIM hasn't added more card functionality to it's products. Running programs and backing up to a card should be basic at this point. Yet you still can't do it on a BB.

The 755 is proving to be more stable than the 700p and the similarly based Centro should be more stable yet. With them dropping the Folio and focusing squarely on the pda phone market yet again, I think Palm is getting back on track. So I'm willing to give the Centro a shot even though it's nothing evolutionary, but something that should've been out a generation ago.

Nothing against the BB. It did the basics very well and does email extremely well. Was very solid to use. For my needs, Palm still won.

On a sidenote, I know people have talked about call quality. On Sprint, I got to use the BB and 700p back to back calling the same number in Australia. The caller said I sounded like I was halfway around the world on the BB but around the corner on the 700p. I didn't expect that as I've heard nothing but the opposite from people on here. That was my first and only direct comparison before I turned it in. Just thought that was interesting.

And you won't see anything innovative from them till their linux based phone gets released hopefully at some point next year. If they know what's good for them, it will be extremely innovative. And if screen shots from ALP are any indication what the UI will be like, it should be right on the money. Will be great to see what RIM does for it's next generation after this. The more competition the better. Keeps companies from sitting on it's haunches just milking it's customers. Samsung f700, HTC Touch Dual and some others should do well to up the ante too.

I've owned a Treo 600 (Sprint), a Motorola Q (VZW), current Treo 700 wx (VZW) and will be moving to a BB8310 on AT&T as soon as they're available. Travel frequently on business and my company lives on Outlook and MSN messenger - so my priorities are: phone, battery life, reception, voice quality, Exchange/Outlook synch & functionality and GPS built in sounds awesome (one less thing to loose). Anything else on top of that is just a bonus. A very typical "business" perspective I suppose. My original T600 was very functional and with 3rd party apps, I could get it to do almost everything I wanted except a hi-res screen and BT. Unfortunately, as everyone's pointed out, Palm hasn't done anything significant since the 650 except prostitute themselves out to MS. Having used WinBlowz(R) Mobile 5 for Dumbphones on the Q and whatever version of WinBlowz(R) Mobile bloatware is running on my T700 I will flee in terror from that OS. The techies can fawn away over WM6. Both the Q and T700 have abysmal battery life (WM5? CDMA? crappy design? Exchange ActiveStink and push email? all the above?). And the T700 is an archaic brick to boot. Got to borrow my boss' Pearl on T-Mob when my Q died on a trip recently (leaving me stranded in HRL - long story). Other than suretype, I was in instant love. Light, compact, you could wail on it all day with email, messaging and still have over half your battery life left at dinner. Where has such a wonderful device been? Sure as **** not on VZW. Anyway - that's my take on the state of the BB world. Their consumer products have made great strides - you know it's improving when hip hop 20 year olds are talking BB bling at the table next to you in Friday's and playing with their Curves. And I am choosing a curve over a 8820 for primarily 'business' purposes - so my $0.02.