Tuesday, August 21, 2007

The Treo/iPhone scorecard

I got my Treo 700p in late June of 2006. I owned it for almost exactly a year. During that time, Palm released a fix for Palm wireless keyboards, and a DST fix for this year's change. They did not release any new versions of Palm Desktop (in fact, a year and a half after Intel-based Macs arrived on the scene, there still is no Intel/Universal version of Palm Desktop) in that time.

(Mark/Space, the producers of third-party sync software for Palm, Windows Mobile, and Blackberry, produced two major versions of their software in the same timeframe)

In addition, there was no update from Palm to fix the numerous bugs in stability and Bluetooth functionality during that entire year. Palm finally released a firmware update in early July - but last week it was withdrawn due to problems with the EVDO radio that seem to be exposed by it. There is no given timeframe for a corrected release. So as of right now, Treo 700p phones are only availble with the original flawed software.

Meanwhile, in Apple-land, I've owned an iPhone since the end of June - slightly under two months. Not only was it more stable and functional out of the box than the Treo, but they've updated the OS on the phone twice so far - the most recent one having been issued about an hour ago. The first one eliminated just about every bug I had noticed initially, so I'm not even sure what they could have fixed this time!

The moral of this story: Treos suck. And the more serious moral is that Apple is quickly redefining the cellphone experience in a lot of ways - most importantly (in my view) with regards to responsiveness and how quickly bugs are fixed.

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