Adios Treo
I always buy fancy phones because I’m an idiot. I set them all up, install cool applications, and customize them for about three days. Then, for the other 99.999999% of the time, I attempt to use them as phones.
Who buys these things and uses them as they are intended? Do people really sit there browsing web sites at incredibly slow speeds and send emails on a tiny keyboard?
So I was pretty tired of my useless Treo, and longed for my old AT&T Wireless Sony T616. It always worked just fine, but I couldn’t use it because it was locked to AT&T. Enter eBay!
I found and ordered a “terminator dongle” off eBay and unlocked my T616. It’s easier said than done, and seems to be more of an art than a science. At least, according to the legions of incomprehensible, phone-obsessed freaks I found while searching Google for help.
Once unlocked, I moved the SIM card from my Treo to the T616 and it worked! Amazing! I have a phone with voice dialing, and it works with a bluetooth headset! These are things the Treo, even though it’s an overpriced “smart phone,” cannot do. Well, there is voice dialing through a third-party Palm application. The Treo works with BT headsets, but you can’t voice dial from the headset.
My PowerBook instantly found the phone, discovered all of its services, and synched my address book and iCal calendars. This happened with basically no work on my part. Oh, I mentioned iCal calendars, by which I mean the calendars I created to test iCal a year ago. I’m much too disorganized to actually use a calendar.
Since this was an AT&T phone, I had to do some searching to get the Cingular GPRS data connection working, but it wasn’t too hard. My PowerBook connected without any trouble, and the phone didn’t even reboot after five minutes!
So long story short, smart phones are crap, and real phones work.
