 I just got my new toy: a brand new Treo 600 smart phone from Cingular Wireless. I was going to switch to Sprint on Monday (you can keep your cell phone number when you change companies as of November 24) but my current carrier suddenly offered a GSM Treo. They came down $50 in the purchase price of this handy little device and matched the Sprint price of $449. It's got:
- A crisp color screen
- My Outlook contact list, so I can look up a number, tap on it and dial that number (I have 3,500 people in my contact list!)
- The kewelest little jangling music-box sound when it turns on or receives a call.
- My Outlook calendar
- Email capability
- A calculator
- The ability to sync with my desktop computer
- A set of tiny little keyboard buttons so I can respond to emails, just like on a Blackberry
- A camera. This is good for amusement purposes only. The pictures are really grainy, but I can demonstrate to friends that I can take picture with it, as shown on TV advertisements for other phones.
It's much smaller than my bulky old Compaq iPaq and it runs on the Palm operating system, as opposed to the Microsoft Pocket PC system. So I'm free of Microsoft in one respect in my life. And I don't have to juggle back and forth between the iPaq and my old cell phone. Everything's combined into one unit.
It's a single-band GSM phone, which means I get coverage in major cities, but if I'm out of the coverage area, I get nothing. There's no analog system it can connect to. But it works on the AT&T Wireless and T-Mobile GSM systems -- so that's a plus. GSM is the system that's popular in Europe.
Give me a call on my cell phone at 630.464.7714 and tell me that you read this in my blog. Cingular says I have 5,000 rollover minutes, and I need to use them up or else they'll expire!
2:00:52 PM 
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