I got a Treo 650 sometime last spring. I love the features. Or rather, I love having email and Jabber on my pocket sized mobile internet device. Extra bonus: "Proper" keyboard for SMSes! Lately Life Balance has been a favorite too. The web browser is not exactly great, but using the Treo as a modem for the laptop makes up for it. What about the phone feature? Sure, it's pretty nice. The address book works well and syncs to the mac (I use missing sync).
What's not to like? It's been incredibly flaky. Not so much with the random reboots, but frequent, far far far too frequent lockups. My best theory is that it when it lost GSM coverage it'd Just Not Recover, in particular if it was trying to do some GPRS traffic.
Pretty much every time I'd leave the house I'd have to restart the phone like that to make it work. We have (slightly spotty) coverage at the house, but on the way down the hill there's a little while with no coverage at all. After getting down to Hollywood proper (with plenty coverage), the phone would claim to have coverage, but not receive any calls or let me place any. Turning the phone module off and on would make it recover. Hello hello? Heeellooo?
I read about the 1.20 firmware update some time ago, but I didn't pay much attention as it was only "out for Windows" and past firmware upgrades didn't seem to help much anyway.
I installed it a few days ago and woah -- it's like getting a brand new phone. Well, not really, but it hasn't crashed once on me (yet). Yay!
There's something curious about how a piece of software or a gadget completely loses your confidence when it's unstable or unpredictable. Don't think fixing those minor bugs in your software or on your website is worth it? Think again. Those little bugs makes your users and customers not trust the features that are working great either.
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