 First Day with my Treo 600
I'm starting to become more comfortable with the 600 after living with it for almost 24 hours. My first strong impression is that it's a logical extension and improvement on the Treo 300. Most functions work very similarly to the way they did on the 300, but usually with a little more sophistication. I used it for most of the day without even looking at the reference manual because it's so fundamentally similar to the 300 in the way it works.
It's fast! For example, it's now clear to me that the 300's browser performance was limited by the processor rather than network bandwidth. The new browser is way faster at rendering pages. Email is also now blazingly fast.
Speaking of the browser: I'm very pleased with it. I always liked the logic the 300's version of Blazer used for rendering pages. It always seemed to do the best job I've ever seen from any PDA browser at intelligently rendering a Web page into the small space of a PDA screen. The new 600 browser seems to use the same rendering logic, and provides lots of neat new features, like great support for one-handed browsing using the 5-way navigation control.
Speaking of the 5-way navigation control, it's really effective at replacing virtually all need for a stylus. All the built-in applications fully support it, while third-party applications vary in their ability to use it (Agendus doesn't work with it at all!). I'm sure third-party developers will be modifying their applications over time to make better use of this great navigation tool.
Short of hacks, all the third-party applications I used on my Treo 300 seem to work fine on 600. I did have a problem with the screen rendering of Hand/RSS last night, but after I sent an email to the developer reporting the problem I received a fix via an email attachment in reply! Stand Alone, Inc. provides some awesome support for their products!
The 600 is a better phone than the 300. First of all, it's a dual band phone so it supports roaming, which the 300 couldn't do. Roaming can be controlled through Option settings on the 600. It also seems to have have a better radio because I'm getting stronger signals in areas where I used to have problems with my 300. It's also a very nice looking phone. I'm surprised at how much I like its form and even its color. I wasn't all that impressed with its looks when just seeing pictures of it on the Web.
Well, that's about all I have to say for now, other than to state the obvious: I'm very pleased with this PDA Phone. It's a great sucessor to what was up until now my favorite PDA, my old Treo 300.
1:06:51 PM 
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