Treo 650 at last

I finally gave up waiting for T-Mobile to release a Treo 650 and got one from Verizon. I was spurred to do so because I also wanted to get a Verizon EVDO card and the EVDO monthly rate is $20 less if you have a Verizon phone.

What do you call it when they fix a regression? The Treo 600 had a serious regression from the Treo 270. In the 270's phone application, you could either dial a number or do an address book lookup, without telling the phone which one you were doing, and it would magically figure it out. You'd just start pressing the buttons and the phone would figure out what you were trying to do. The Treo 600 lacked the feature and it annoyed me to no end. Well, the 650 has the feature again.

However, perhaps as payment, the Treo 650's calendar application has a serious regression. On previous Treos, the calendar has an "upcoming events" view that lists as many of the next future events as will fit on the screen. I used this view often. The Treo 650 lacks that view.

Also, the 650's Bluetooth support is weak. It supports headsets and handsfree kits, and supports hotsync over Bluetooth. There's a hack that lets you do (incredibly slow) Bluetooth dial-up networking (DUN). But there's no Bluetooth file transfer, nor does the 650 work with Mac OS X's Address Book.