Phone suckage

My Treo 700p sucks. I will now clarify that. I have been using a Treo 700p since last June. As a phone, it does do some things well. The handset performance and volume is better than the Treo 650 I had before. Verizon's service is better than Cingular's (even though the CDMA multiple-call management interface is awful), and EVDO is a lifesaver for me on the occasions I need Internet access from my MacBook Pro (I hook up a USB sync cable, set up the modem application, and go to work). It has way more available RAM than the 650, so I can actually store documents on it.

But here's the fundamental problem. It's unstable. Bluetooth connections drop seemingly at random, with only a battery-out reset restoring some semblance of function. I do it every morning as a habit now. Resets also happen a lot during the course of a day, at the end of hotsyncs, and if I get a call just at the moment I try and place a call? Yep, another reset.

Today, Palm finally fessed up to the suckage. In a post on their new corporate blog, Palm's manager of Treo products promised a full firmware update sometime around the end of May. He discussed what it is expected to fix, and some of the reasons why it has taken so long. I still think it's a partial crock, but at least they said definitively that the fix is enroute. I will try and suck it up for another month with the phone (my third one - the first two died).

If I had a better alternative, I would have ditched this months ago, but despite how much the Treo 700p sucks I really can't find any tool that does all this better. And the iPhone would take me back to Cingular, which ain't happening.