Palm Treo 650

I can’t recommend another excellent free ebook by Zen of Palm enough. It accurately describes the key differences between designing for desktop and mobile, which explains why PalmOS was so much easier to use than the various Windows-based mobile formats from Microsoft at the time. I even wrote a whole blog series about this book two decades ago ( https://dingyu.me/blog/zen-of-palm-1 ). I switched from a Dell Pocket PC to a Treo 650, and it was such a revelation. IMHO, this little phone is still one of the best in terms of simplicity, even today.

I got the (old) Treo 650 (or sinilar) from my father as he bought a new one back when I was a teenager. I was the only one with a handheld at school (I was maybe 13/14 years old), and I had a funny discussion with teachers about task management on a handheld (they obviously were overwhelmed by a teenager consisting tasks belong in a handheld, not a physical notebook). I think it still was one of the best handhelds ever produced.

I can point to my phone as being one of those devices that's _lost_ functionality over the past ten years. Losing functionality is not bad in and of itself, if I stand to gain something in excess of what I lost, but that hasn't happened. Consider when I made the switch from a Treo 650 to an HTC Sensation (yes, I had that Treo a _long_ time): I sacrificed the hard keyboard and exceptionally easy-to-use operating system for Wi-Fi, a decent quality camera, fast-at-the-time 3.5G network connectivity, and the entire Android ecosystem. Then I broke the screen, and got an HTC M9. I gained a bigger screen that I didn't want, an IR blaster that I never used, faster CPU, more memory, more flash... for a device that I didn't do much with. Worse, I lost the replaceable battery - I actually had multiple batteries before that. Then I broke the screen on _that_, and got an HTC 10. I again gained a bigger screen that I didn't want, I lost the IR blaster that I never used, and again got a faster CPU, more memory, and more flash for a device that I didn't do much with. Then the battery went flat, and I got an Asus Zenfone 8, which gained me basically nothing over the HTC 10 except 128GB of storage that I don't use. In this trade, I lost having a good camera in my pocket - the Zenfone 8's camera is atrocious, and even my HTC Sensation took better photos than it does. It has a headphone jack, but it's died and I haven't fixed it... which is a shame, because I have an 80s car with the cassette de…

I was a Palm holdout into close to 2013. They weren't capable of the same range of things that a modern Android smartphone is, but it genuinely felt that someone had put time and effort into making the absolute best experience out of what they _could_ do. On the Treo 650, for instance, making a call meant hitting Send (a hard key) from anywhere in the UI, typing a name to start a live search - you did not need to focus into a text box first - and hitting Send again to start the call. Likewise, if I wanted to send a text message, I'd hit the SMS button, start typing a name, hit Select to open that conversation, and then start typing the message. The device had a touchscreen, but for the most common activities, you didn't need it. The 650 did not have built-in Wi-Fi, but with the Enfora Wi-Fi Sled and Opera Mobile, Web browsing was actually a decent experience. Likewise, I had some basic networked apps like AIM on there. Before the 650, I had a Handspring Visor and the VisorPhone attachment. The VisorPhone was way ahead of its time, but what finally killed that for me was a side effect of Palm devices not having memory protection. If someone sent me an MMS message, the entire thing would immediately freeze (it had no MMS support, and didn't handle receiving one gracefully). I'd have to take the batteries out to reset it. As more and more people did this, it became a more frequent occurrence.

The Treo 650 was the seemingly perfect blend of a color IIIc with tactile keyboard, stylus, cell phone capabilities and good ol PalmOS.