Unhappy With My Palm Treo

I never imagined I’d hear myself saying this, but maybe ditching Windows Mobile, no matter how horrible the battery life, was a bad decision on my part. While I couldn’t get enough of my Treo 700p when I first bought it, after loading office apps, VNC, SSH, a decent e-mail client, and struggling to find software for tabbed web browsing, I’m afraid my Treo is doing too much and it’s slowing down.

And to add insult to injury, the phone doesn’t even support multi-tasking.

So, I’m left with two choices: 1) Go back to Windows Mobile, or 2) Go back to BlackBerry. While I’m quite experienced with Windows Mobile, the BlackBerry Pearl and new BlackBerry Curve look very appealing. The big draw back for me with RIM’s BlackBerry was that it didn’t have any real multimedia options. You couldn’t take a picture or capture video with it. For the corporate world, that’s acceptable, but as more and more people “gotta have” what they see on the hip of Hollywood, BlackBerry is more than a phone: it’s a status symbol.

While my Treo is good at doing some things better than most (BlackBerry), like lightning-fast web surfing via the Blazer web browser and zooming through Remote Desktop and VNC sessions with the touch screen, I just think now I’m ready to go back to a multi-tasking smartphone where I can leave applications running in the background without special memory hacks (Thanks, Palm).

While the future of the Treo looks bright, they’ve been promising ACCESS Linux for years and every year I think about keeping my aging Palm OS around is another year they push my expectations to another date. Thanks a lot, guys.