Mailbox size over limit.

Treo Nostalgia

It was less than a year ago that I was still using my Treo 600. I didn’t part with the thing till the screen flickered in the cold and the speakers buzzed at every other call.

I know, I know. It’s geeky to talk about cell phones. But this is important. It was the perfect phone.

It had the perfect qwerty keyboard for your thumbs that can be alternatively used with one- or two-handed. I’d type SMS to my friends and notes to myself. The keyboard just made text entry so fast. Whether it was on the subway half-clinging to a steel pole or some quiet moments in a coffee shop. I could type on that little thing at half the speed as on my regular keyboard.

I set it up for imapi email. Every time somebody emailed my yahoo account, my phone would start and heat up, gourging on all the GPRS data it could for the latest junk mail from Tech Republic on "The ten best ways to secure your enterprise network.” Sometimes, I get real emails too: like that time when I was waiting for this girl I liked to show up for dinner and she emailed me from work saying that she was tired and wanted go to bed.

It had a touchscreen. I made full use of it when I was bored off my rockers at work, waiting for my boss to come out of a meeting. I played Minesweeper in the hallway in front of his office.

The real surprise was that it was a "World Phone." Quad-band. I took it with me to Hong Kong. I filled it with SIM cards from Three and China Mobile. It left me free to roam the city while my relatives could contact me at anytime.

I think I might’ve wrote a few poems on this thing. It was great.

I finally gave it up when on a trip to London, Ontario, I left my charger at this guy’s house I was crashing at. By that point, the shiny stuff on the surface of the phone was coming off and, really, the battery was starting to give out it last dying breath by super-heating everytime I have my phone on.

I have an HTC Touch now. It’s a few years more advance than my Treo. It’s 3G: faster than my broadband connection at home. It silently gets pushed email from the Exchange Server from my work. I get close to desktop like web browsing on it with a third-party browser.

Palm has officially stopped making anymore phones for the Palm OS. It’s a dead platform. All the old software houses that thought Palm was going to be bigger than Microsoft are going out of business, or migrating over to making Iphone apps. But I missed my Treo. I miss it’s pep and DIY-ness. The phone I have now is a tethered corporate tablet.

Albert Britnell

IMAG0047
Originally uploaded by Self_Same_Self

I took this picture a few months back.

Strange.

I was remember that time J. took me there when it sold books and I was all confused. All I could remember was the smell of her hair and the flash of her teeth when she smiled.