WombatNation

I suffered through about a month of misery of having my Treo 600 hang on me, typically while trying to place an outbound call or just seconds after receiving an inbound call. The screen would freeze for about ten seconds and either the outbound call would never go out, or the inbound call would be disconnected. In the top left corner “Sprint” would sometimes be replaced by “print” or “rint” and the message “No Service” would also appear at the top of the screen.

Oddly enough, email and web access were not affected nearly as dramatically. Sometimes the Treo would hang for a few minutes while downloading email, which would chew through a lot of the battery’s charge, but it didn’t happen that often.

Another problem is that the battery ran down really quickly. It needed to be recharged every day. The only way the Treo could survive a weekend without charging was if I turned off the wireless radio each night.

Finally, I got around to searching the web to see if this was a common problem. Of course it was. It’s easy to forget that there are a gazillion people out there like me who have problems with things and then post on the web about it. Just like this blog post.

Other people had reported this problem on the TreoCentral (here’s one of many threads on the topic) discussion forums and on several other Treo discussion forums. The first proposed solution was to send your Treo back to Palm if it was still under warranty and the ESN on the back was between 09600716001 and 09600864216. Mine is in that range, but is long since out of the warranty period.

The next thing people discovered was that replacing the battery would fix the problem. I came within one click of ordering a new battery before I decided to take one more look at what people had posted.

I then discovered a couple of posts suggesting that the problem was with the battery connection. The real benefit of replacing the battery actually came from reseating the battery connection. While the Treo would still work with a loose connection, it caused battery discharge and wireless radio problems. I suspect this might be because of undesirable drops in voltage or current across the connection.

To make a long story only a little bit longer, I used some excellent online instructions from gethightech.com to take apart my Treo and reseat the battery connection. Those instructions are for replacing a battery, but they tell you exactly what you need to know to just fix the connection.

Problem solved. It’s now been almost two weeks since I fixed the battery connection, and I haven’t had a single reoccurrence of what had become a near daily problem.

Update 11/1/2006: The problem came back. I reset the battery connection again. Unfortunately, now my Treo reboots everytime I turn it on. I did a battery reset, which fixed the reboot problem, but caused my Treo to no longer find the Sprint network. Then I did a hard reset, and everything seems back to normal.

I haven’t posted about my Treo 600 in a long time, but I finally got around to doing something I’ve meant to do for a long time - syncing my Treo to Evolution.

Just over a year ago, I got my Sony Clie to sync to Evolution on Red Hat 9. Though I had already purchased the Treo by then, I didn’t try to sync it until tonight. It turns out the Lazy Web works both ways. Someone posted a comment to my post about my Clie asking me for advice on syncing a Treo 600 to Evolution. That comment caused me to stop being so lazy and to see if I could get it to work. Happily, it works and it was easy to set up. Well, assuming that you consider creating files as symbolic links as the root user as easy. The real easy part was that someone else had already provided all the instructions.

The first stop on my path to Treo syncing enlightenment was at Carsten Clasohm’s blog. Then, it was on to the awesome FedoraNews website for the gnome-pilot tutorial and its simple step-by-step instructions. Be sure to change the type from serial to USB and feel free to change the speed to 115200. I don’t have the spare time or the interest to confirm whether it really makes it sync faster than at 57600, but at least it doesn’t make it not work. And, as far as I can tell, it doesn’t make it noticeably slower. And, one of my high school teachers once told me that anytime you can set the speed to 115200, you should.

I can now confirm that syncing a Treo 600 with Evolution 2.0.2 (using gnome-pilot) on Fedora Core 3 with kernel 2.6.10-1.741 works. I even did it twice to make sure it wasn’t a fluke. I synced my address book, To Do list, and calendar.

So, if you happen to be interested in the technical viability of any of the other items on my ToDo list, please ask away.

Sunday was the T-Mobile International bike race in San Francisco. Below are some thumbnail images of the photos I took with the camera on my Treo 600. The full-sized images are on another page.

Rumors about the feature set of the Treo 650 are getting more detailed and believable. Of the features described, I find the following very enticing, albeit not enticing enough to upgrade from the Treo 600. If I didn’t already have the 600, though, I would be trying to put in an order right now.

• 16 bit 320×320 TFT screen
• Palm OS Garnet (version 5.4)
• 1.3 MP Camera with digital zoom.
• Built in video capture capability.
• New browser that can display frames and upload files. It also has an integrated download manager.
• Moving to the “standard” palmOne application inventory with a more robust Contacts application and Today screen.

The upgrade to Palm OS 5.4 brings better security and multimedia support, plus the infrastructure for some of these other features.

While Bluetooth support sounds great, I don’t have any other Bluetooth capable devices. It’s one of those features those that’s hard to value before you fully adopt it.

[via PDABuzz]

Howard Rheingold wrote recently about his troubles with his Treo 600, and his even greater troubles in trying to extract reasonable customer service out of Sprint.

Fortunately, I’ve run into few problems with my Treo, with none of them serious enough to require me to run the Sprint PCS customer service gauntlet. My only recent experience with their call center was when I was trying to change my service from my old phone to the Treo. Two of the people I spoke with were reasonably helpful, and both were very friendly. Too bad I was just calling for info. One was beyond useless. I dumped him as quickly as possible and called back in hope of not getting another mouth breather. The final person I dealt with was a bit shifty. While he told me that Sprint probably wouldn’t give me the rebate (they actually did honor it), he told me I should go ahead and submit it anyway. He did manage to get my phone programmed and working pretty quickly, though. Based on what I have and heard from others, I was extremely lucky.

I’ve seen a lot worse in the Sprint stores. While buying my last phone, I overhead a salesperson guilt trip a young kid into buying a far more expensive plan than he needed. Half of the other salespeople sat around and chatted while a line of about ten people waited for service.

If Sprint didn’t offer such a cheap all-you-can-eat data plan, I would almost certainly switch carriers.

When I bought my Treo 600, I definitely planned to use it as a mobile phone, Palm OS PDA, digital camera, and MP3 player, but I didn’t imagine I might be using it as a USB drive, too. Softick Card Export II allows you to mount the SD card in the Treo as if it were a USB drive. While you could always pop the card out, put it in an SD card reader, and connect the card reader to a USB port, it certainly is a lot easier to just connect the Treo using the USB sync cable you already have.

Right now, they claim support only for Windows 200/XP/Me, but they are working on OS X and Linux support. You don’t have to install any software on the desktop machine, but their software needs to know how to talk to the USB drivers for each OS. Hopefully, it won’t take them too long to sort out any minor differences in how the app needs to respond when talking to a Linux or OS X box. The beta version of Card Export II currently costs $15.

PalmOne updates software for Treo 600 smart phone | CNET News.com

Late last week palmOne released another software update for the Treo 600. So far, it’s available for SprintPCS subscribers only. Either they care the most about us Sprintians, or they think that we will make good guinea pigs, and therefore they care the least about us.

The things I really care about in update 1.20:

• More reliable audio

Hmmm, that was a really short list. I’m hoping that the PocketTunes MP3 player has fewer audio dropouts with the upgrade. I currently get dropouts every couple of songs at random.

The things I might care about in update 1.20:

• POP3 client now in ROM (Assuming this saves memory and makes it faster)
• Support for message priority on inbound and outbound SMS messages (I don’t get enough messages a day right now to care about sorting on priority)
• Playback of voice memos received via PictureMail service (Assuming I run into someone else some day who uses Sprint’s PictureMail service)

My wife has the Powerbook in San Antonio and my work laptop with Windows obviously went away when I stopped working at Avaya, so I can’t check out the upgarde until my wife comes back tomorrow. It would be nice if palmOne supported a cross-platform installer so I could install it from the Linux box I am currently using, but I guess that is too much too ask for.

A new review of the Treo 600 showed up on the O’Reilly Network site recently. This review is especially useful if you:

• Live in Canada
• Own a Treo 180 and are thinking about upgrading
• Want to sync your Treo to a Mac
• And/or are looking for a broad description, with screenshots, of the basic features of the Treo 600

Overall, I think the review does a pretty good job of describing the basics of the Treo 600. I like that he included a bunch of anecdotes about oddities, problems, or cool features that he happened on. A lot of reviews that I read are almost indistinguishable from corporate press releases.

I’m sure Success BBQ sounded like a good name for a restaurant when they opened the place. The barbed wire fence now surrounding the entire building suggests otherwise.

I took this photo with the camera on my Treo 600 while my wife was driving down the street. I’ve gotten a bit better at extracting acceptable photos from the camera. After adjusting the contrast and cropping the photo a bit, I scaled it down to about 400 pixels wide. The images start at 640×480. Scaling the photos from the Treo camera down in size using a good image manipulation program (like the GIMP) is almost always a good idea.

The first thing you need to do to learn how to get good photos from your Treo 600’s camera is to read this article at wireless-doc.com. Lighting, lighting, lighting.

And if you still don’t believe you can get decent photos from the camera, check out his portfolio of photos taken with it. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t slowly been getting better and better photos from my Treo 600.

The next thing you need to do is download QSet (requires free registration with MyTreo.net before downloading). QSet lets you set the compression factor that the Treo software uses. The default is 65. If you bump it up to 90, you will often get significantly better photos. The photos will take up more space, but it’s a small price to pay. With the Q set at 90, my photos are usually about 65 KB each. With a Q of 65, they averaged about 45 KB.

Timing is key. Since the Treo doesn’t have a flash to illuminate the scene, the software gets very aggressive about boosting the gain. In low light situations, I’ve noticed that when I switch to the camera, the image starts out very dark. After about five seconds, the brightness and contrast start looking okay. But, after about ten seconds (the exact timing depends on the light level), the infamous blue pixels start appearing near the edges, and sometimes dance across the whole screen. The problem is that the Treo software has boosted the gain so high that the signal is clipping. Apparently they made the max value a blue pixel instead of a white pixel. Otherwise, it would look like snow.

So, what you need to do is get the time right between when you switch to the camera and when you snap the photo. That’s a hassle, but it’s usually an issue only in low-light situations. Obviously, you also need to hold the Treo as still as possible when taking photos, especially when indoors.

Of course, you shouldn’t waste too much time trying to use it indoors. What can you expect from a tiny camera with fixed focus, no flash, and no manual settings to control the gain? But if you are outdoors with moderate lighting, you can take some surprisingly acceptable photos.