Frabjous Times

The second bit of technology I bought was a Handspring Treo 270 combination PDA and GSM phone. I did not want to wait for the still unreleased Treo 600 to be ported to GSM, nice as that item seems.

In recent months I'd been getting more and more annoyed at the way the belt clip for my old Motorola phone would let go and send the thing plummeting down to whatever hard surface I was standing over, particularly when getting out of our Saturn. Perhaps as a result of this, the phone has been having problems getting a charge and keeping it, and the small compartment for the SIM card kept popping loose. I'd gone through about three of the colored rubber covers for it (they loosened and would get lost) and the display had a few bad scratches in it. It was time for a change.

Not nearly so sorry a case is my Handspring Visor Platinum, but still ripe for replacement. This was somewhat better cushioned against spills by its leather holster by Krusell, but clearly was starting to take some wear because of a couple of bad lines of pixels at the extreme top edge of the screen. The 8MB of memory was right at the limit of the usual capacity I was using (mostly Plucker and AvantGo webpages being synced daily), and it seemed as if the Graffiti area was having more trouble lately recognizing my stylus strokes. Along the Motorola phone, this was purchased as a replacement of my original Visor Deluxe (Ice) with VisorPhone Springboard module, lost or stolen mysteriously.

The new PDA/phone is working quite well so far. The color display nice to have at times, although I note that it is a little bit smaller than the display area on the Platinum. It's been a couple years since I've had a device with the miniature thumb keyboard for text input but I think it won't take me too long to relearn that skill. The phone interface is still familiar to me from the VisorPhone days, and I was pleased to see that after years of syncing later, it still remembered my speed dial shortcuts I'd defined way back then. I'm just hoping its somewhat alarmingly fragile-feeling flip top will hold up to the abuse these devices tend to receive around me. Right now I've got it in the leather case that the Platinum came with (for half a grand a pop I would think Handspring might have thrown in some kind of protective case, but I guess that would have been a bad move marketing-wise).