Friday, December 29, 2006

The End?

I am sitting on a plane and blogging it what appears to be the last day or days this will be possible to do.

On Aug 17 Boeing announced ( http://www.boeing.com/news/releases/2006/q3/060817a_nr.html ) they will shutting down their internet in the air service company called Connexion and writing off $320Million.

Several airlines had installed these systems in their fleets, JAL, Korean, Lufthansa, SAS, ANA, Etihad, El-Al, Asiana and Singapore Air all at an approximate one time cost of $500,000 per plane and a running cost of flying with equipment that weighs like four people.

It is odd to see this company close and the service disappear. Especially now when the Internet is main stream and many use it for basic communication. I could understand Boeing for closing this or maybe even for not succeeding as they are not a telecom service company, but , shocked not a single provider has decided to buy this out.

To add to my confusion ever since Ericsson released their airline enabled GSM service and had the Norwegian NPT agree on usage and test, more and more airlines are gearing up to enabling usage of GSM cell phones during flight. There are even roaming auctions on the way.

This feels very much like buying DSL hardware stocks in 2000, you knew everyone will have DSL at home and these hardware manufacturers will hardly manage to supply the demand, yet the stock failed and till today haven't recovered.

am I missing out on something?

Sunday, December 24, 2006

My new Treo680

My new Treo680 arrived last week.
I decided to wait for the right time to perform my upgrade and ensure I am doing it right.
I charged my Treo as instructed (till light turns solid green) and then simply plugged it in to synchronize with my existing data from my 650.

Synchronizing looked like it was off to a good start and then it froze or seemed to be stuck at MBIn- MRIndex which is an element of Avantgo.

I therefore decided to eliminate Avantgo and try again. I stopped the process. I Hard reset the 680 and chose to erase all data. I then deleted the Avantgo components from the appropriate directories in my PC's Treo sub directories and re synchronized.

All went surprisingly very well. Even Versamail synchronized and all the mail from the old device got copied over. The new Treo 680 seems to have gotten all my information, bookmarks, speedials, email etc. and I am off to a good start.

The manual states to charge till the green light is solid and this is what I did.

It was night time and I left my Treo on all night as I always do, in case I get phone calls. The only active component of my Treo is my Versamail, it is set to check mail every 5 minutes, even my Bluetooth was off.
I woke up in the morning to notice I was already on low battery and was rather surprised, it was already in the red and this is a brand new device which I followed the instructions to the T.

How could it have a worse battery than the 650????

I charged it again in the morning but this time I started paying attention to the battery in more detail. I noticed that the green light turns on and if I press on the battery indicator ( which shows a full battery with a charging icon on it ) it says Charging 100%. but yet if I unplug the charger from charging and then press on the battery it says anywhere from 95% to 98% but not full or 100%. I then spent the day using it and noticed I was at 40% in 6 hours. This is totally unusable and I put in a ticket to palm.
In the mean time I am charging it more carefully and trying to get to 100%. This morning I managed to get to 99%.

Other first impressions;
The Treo 680 is indeed thinner and smaller and the lack of the antenna helps a lot in having it in my shirt pocket. The bulkiness is really reduced.

Once again they changed the position of the menu key, why do they keep doing this? Are the people who design this device not using it? This time the menu key was replace with an on/off key so inadvertently whenever I try to copy and paste or other menu function I keep turning off the device. This is extremely annoying.

The new front screen is totally different and is taking a lot getting used to.

Dialing from the call log, which is something I do a lot seems now to be a two press process instead of one.
The phone so far only rebooted on me once, I can not attribute it to anything specific, maybe it was my usage, I was on the phone with my ear piece and cleaning up my email at the same time.
The SMS send functionality is different and is totally inconsistent with the previous version or with making sense.
I am used to typing in a persons' name and the treo looks it up while I type it, bringing up only numbers categorized as Mobile. It seems to be bringing up other numbers as well. On entries that have more than one molible number it inconsistently doesn't seem to show all of them. I am trying to understand how it is working and maybe I will come up with a solution.

What are your experiences with the new Treo680?