PCS Phone Palm Treo 650 (Sprint)

I've had the Treo 650 for months, and agree with most other raters that it had problems. It reset spontaneously, had 50% less usable memory than the 600 and the phone quality was not as good. Palmone has updated the ROM now and fixed all these problems. My usable memory went from 5 mb to almost 11mb, and the phone is now completely stable. No need for reservations anymore. The ROM update is not yet available for Cingular, but will be, I suppose, eventually.

Have you ever noticed that you can always talk to a sales person but you always have to wait for a customer serivce person? The same should be true of activation, but my expereicne was so bad I would rather return the phone than take the chance that I might someday need customer service.I am a 'power' phone user--the kind of user companies want becuase I use so many minutes. I currently use ATT. I want to switch. Why? Because I cant get a decent signal between my home and work despite living in a major metropolitan area. So I decided to take a chance with Sprint.OK, so I buy the Sprint via Amazon and I finally receive it today. I charge the phone and call the Sprint number for activation. First, you have to enter a 13 digit number that can be found in teeny-tiny print inside the phone. Supposedly it works by voice recognition, but in my case, it gave up and connected me to a customer service agent. The agent asks for my SSN and surprise, according to their computer I had an account with them eight years ago which had a $29.00 balance. I was told that I need to pay it before I can activate. I explain that I dont recall ever having a sprint phone, but anything is possible since I am a business owner and I may have had a phone for an employee back then. Of course, my explanation didnt matter and they transferred me to collections. Before you can speak to a collections agent, you have to enter your 10 digit PCS number--now in my case I dont have a number, so I was trapped in voice mail hell. I entered 10 zeroes and eventually after sitting in a queue I managed to reach a human being. The agent asks me for my SSN again, pulls up my account, at which time, I said, I will pay the $29.00 under protest and contest it later. The agent then said, "never mind you'll have to call back since our system is down." I said I would rather wait, or have you call me since otherwise I will have to go thru the queue again. I was told I could wait, and was put on hold. The agent evenutally returns and says he is sorry but I'll have to call back. I ask for a supervisor. First the agent says no supervisor is availalbe and I said I'll wait for one. I had to wait about 30 seconds. A woman answers saying she is the superivsor and "can I help you?" I said "I have been on the phone close to 30 minutes now and." Before I could complete the sentence, she says their system is down, she cant help me, and hangs up on me. I swear I never raised my voice.I call the main activation number again. after going tru the same dysfunctional voice recognition, I get a live agent. I explain the problem and the agent says the system is working again and she will trnasfer me to collections. Again I cant enter the PCS number, but eventually I get into a queue and 3 minutes later I am speaking to a new agent in collections. I offer to pay my bill, and then I am told "There is a $5.00 fee to pay by phone!" I said, I am sorry, its bad enough you are making me pay for a charge I am contesting that is eight years old and I will not pay $5.00 for the privilege of paying a $29.00 bill. I asked how I go about paying otherwise, and was put on hold. The agent returned and said "never mind" he will waive the $5.00 charge. How considerate. OK, so now I pay, and then I ask to be transferred back to activation. He says sure, and proceeds to disconnect me, presumably by accident.Well, being persistent, and excited about playing with a new gadget, I called activation a third time. I didnt even bother trying to use the voice recogntion, so I entered the teeny-tiny 13 digit number. Confident that I am finally going to get activated, I put my phone on speaker and waited. Guess what? I was disconnected again! By this time I'm thinking that my ATT phone isnt so bad after all, but being a glutton for punishment, I called a fourth time. This time I did eventually reach an activation agent at which time I was informed that their system doesnt show posted payments for twelve hours! "Please call back."I am done calling Sprint. I intend to return my phone to Amazon tomorrow. I would rather use two cans and a string than have to put up with another customer service nightmare.I hope enough of you reading this will choose another carrier, and maybe Sprint will realize that it's time to fix its broken system.

I have used the handspring deveices and loved the Treo 300. Still think that design is superior if you have to carry around a brick to talk on. The 600 and 650 series was a nice change. The 650 addresses the limitations and flaws of the 600.There are still a lot of BUGS on this device. The reviewer who states that it retarts frequently is not kidding. How can you be used to that chaos? I am a Mac user so am not used to crashes, maybe that is it. This 650 device crashes when I check mail each time. The speakerphone drops in and out and the keys are now so close together typing is impossible for anyone who can palm a basketball.I have called Sprint and they said the mail crashes it's on my server. Also when dding contacts it crashes. Each function it seems to have crashed at leasty once.Well, Blackberry works fine on my server and there are not many options to the mail management so something is wrong with the application. Updates are not easy unless you have the correct cable.[...]

I "upgraded" from a Tungsten T3 and am still not sure if I can handle the much smaller screen, tiny RAM cache, and missing buttons.I too have suffered several spontaneous reboots in the past 6 days of ownership. Many of these (and the reliability complaints in other reviews) can probably be attributed to the drastic changes made to the memory configuration. The 650 basically has an internal memory card that provides most of it's main memory. This is great for nonvolatility (such as when changing batteries), but bad for slowness and incompatibility problems for many existing programs. To help with the slowness, there is a small amount (10 MB) of real RAM, but that isn't enough for many applications such as games and those that use a lot of data. Incidentally, the Tungsten T5 has been panned for the same problem. I bought a 1GB SD card, so I was able to install all the applications from my old PDA; I just couldn't get some of them to run.This all manifests itself in OS crashes. You know it's happened when the device inexplicably starts rebooting itself. I'm curious why a company so obsessed with backward compatibility made a change that breaks so many programs (such as StreetFinder), and who responds with the comment that we should contact each program's manufacturer to see if they'll rewrite their software just to work with the 650. Sheesh!That being said, my main complaint is that that the Treo's Bluetooth stack is very minimal at best. It only supports the hands-free profile. Even though the documentation says "headset" in many places, it doesn't truly support headsets for MP3s, Audible books, and the like. This fact is buried on page 69 of the manual: "Please note, however, that you cannot use a headset with Bluetooth wireless technology to listen to MP3 files". After downloading the Bluetooth car kit patch, I am able to use the phone hands-free in my car, but I'm curious why a brand new device needed a patch already for a fairly mature/stable technology.My last big complaint is that they took away so many of the usability features that I'd gotten used-to on my last Palm. They took away many of the hardware buttons, which make many of the classic games now unplayable. With the T3, I had 5 buttons that I could customize, Now there are only 3 and one of those is really needed for the phone, so there are really only 2 available. They also took away the wake-up functionality of the buttons; you now have to press the power-on button, wait for the device to wake up, and then press one of the buttons. Maybe a future patch will enable each of the keyboard keys to be a button. And they took away the always-present toolbar. This was probably due to optimizations with the smaller screen, but I'd like to be able to make the choice. With the loss of the toolbar, you lose the drop down list of past applications and only have sporadic access to the clock, a Bluetooth control icon, and a few other icons.The bottom line is that many, many concessions were made to the PDA functionality in order to cram the phone features in. If having everything in one device is very important to you, then this probably isn't a bad choice. But if you consider yourself a PDA power-user, you're probably better off going with a real PDA and a real phone. If you're mostly interested in games and such, the N-Gage or Zodiac devices would probably meet your needs better. The N-Gage even has a phone.