Rants

This is a special area of the blog where I sound off about issues that I believe adversely affect all Treo 700w users. For things I like for Treo 700w users, see the Raves section. The views expressed here are my own opinions based on observations and personal experiences with the Treo 700w. June 10, 2006 One of my general peeves with today's PDA's is the lack of storage space that comes with them. The Treo 700w comes with 128mb RAM but only has 60MB available for programs and files. The rest is used up for the WM5 operating system. This is adequate for simple business users but totally inadequate for general purpose users like myself. In my experience, over time, most users will end up with a pelthora of applications, games, mp3's and videos that they'll want to use with their Treo 700w's and 60mb won't cover it. A better minimum storage size would be 1 GB of space. This is ample room for lots of apps, games and other fun stuff. I recently found a great deal on a 1 GB SD which I installed, but like the WiFi card, it uses up the expansion slot, so you can have one or the other but not both. This lack of storage is not crippling usually, but it shows a lack of understanding of what people are actually doing with their devices these days. And it's not just a Treo 700w problem. What I'd really like to see is 1 GB of storage built-in to the Treo 700w PLUS another expansion slot for SD or Mini-SD. Memory is cheap again and you can even get a 4 GB SD card for under $100. And that's at retail, so a manufacturer like Palm should easily be able to get a deal that will only add a few dollars to the cost of a new unit. Do that Palm and you'll really have a killer PDA that millions more will flock to buy. June 1, 2006 Today's rant is about the lack of a built-in WiFi card for the Treo 700w. This is a serious over-sight on the part of Palm designers. What were they thinking? (continued...) Did they think that users would not want to take advantage of the free wireless access that's taking the world by storm? In my neighborhood alone there are over 200 free access points available. Did they think that users would naturally want to pay wireless carriers a hefty fee everytime they wanted to access Internet features? Whatever they were thinking at the time, they seriously hobbled the 700w in this area. I'm sure they've paid for it though with sales lost to competing units and returns of Treo 700w's. Other PDA/Phone devices like the HP iPaq 6900 come with WiFi built-in so we know that it's more than feasible to produce. Hopefully, they will get this right when they update the model. Until then, we are forced to use third party solutions like the Spectec SDW-820 802.11b SDIO wireless LAN card. This causes an additional conflict since there is only one expansion slot which many people will be using for memory expansion. This is an unsatisfactory situation and forces me to give Palm a thumbs-down for not adding a built-in WiFi solution for such an obvious need on the part of end-users. Do you disagree? Have something worthy to add? Tell me about it by emailing me at the address on the Contact page. I'll publish your comments if they're relevant and worthy.