Ditching your iPod for a Treo 700P
posted Sunday, 18 June 2006
Those of you following my blog for a while probably know that I write a lot about two gadgets in particular that I own – the Treo 650 phone (which I just upgraded to a Treo 700P) and the iPod (which I currently own the 5th generation 60GB model capable of playing video). While I love both devices, my ultimate goal as a gadget freak is to only have one to carry around. You know, the whole “convergence” thing taken to it’s essence.Some recent studies have suggested that most people want a phone that’s just a phone and doesn’t do a zillion other things. This may or may not be true, but if it is, I think it’s partly due to the current set of phones that “pretend” to be all-in-one devices. These phones are not the “smartphones” that comprise the Treo, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile phones, but rather are tiny stylish devices like the Motorola Razr which have cameras, calendars, and now often MP3 players built in.. The small screens and limited space for buttons and controls, not to mention a tiny batteries that have to cope with more demand for power, means that these devices end up being mainly good for novelty uses compared to dedicated MP3 players like the iPod or full-fledged digital cameras – even the sleekest compact of these.
For those of us who are too old or geeky to care about looking fashionable and don’t need the smallest phone on the block, the Palm (and previously Handspring) Treo have long been a great phone that combines a huge array of other uses due to its sporting the PalmOS operating system, the one used on Palm personal digital assistants for more than 10 years. Thousands of programs, many free and many others inexpensive shareware, have been written for this platform to the point where you could almost compare Treos to tiny PC's.
For example I used my Treo 650 as a GPS (along with a tiny GPS receiver that hid in my glove compartment and which the Treo would connect to wirelessly) in order to get constant indications of where I was on the road, turn-by-turn directions to a destination, and even dynamic rerouting if I missed a turn – all communicated via both the Treo’s screen as well as a large choice of audio voices. I had all my contact information, schedules, to-do lists, and notes that I could sync with my MS Outlook and hosted exchange account. I had a version of Quicken (“Pocket Quicken” as it’s called), so I could record transactions on the road and sync with my main Quicken program when I got home. I had a program that allowed me to view my desktop of my PC at home and control any aspect of my computer no matter where I was. I got my email, of course, and was able to communicate via instant messages, text messaging, etc. I could also view full web pages and access most websites with no problem. Oh yes, and there was a phone too!
While the Treos had several MP3 players, none really gave the same degree of elegance as the combination of iTunes and the iPod. Many had features that the iPod didn’t, though. Pocket Tunes is the best known of these programs and has probably the largest array of capabilities - in addition to playing MP3’s, it can play Ogg Vorbis format files (an open-source format that has better quality and smaller files than MP3), and Windows Media Audio file format (a proprietary format that MS developed). Within the last year it also started supporting DMA-protected WMA files from music subscription sites like Yahoo! Music, Rhapsody, and Napster To Go. This allows you to subscribe to a service for a $10-15/month fee and download an unlimited number of songs to your computer and subsequently to your portable device. Pocket Tunes in its Deluxe version also has had the ability to stream a type of internet radio called Shoutcast (MP3 streams), so you could listen to live radio, although until very recently not at a very good quality level due to the network speeds at which cell phones have been able to communicate. If you are an audio book fan and have an account with the largest digital audio book company out there, Audible.com, Treos, as well as all PalmOS and PocketPC-based phones and PDA’s have long been able to sync Audible format files from your computer and play them. More recently those who have a phone with a cellular data plan or a PDA with a Wifi connection could also download programs from their Audible library on the fly via a program called Audible Air.
Most of the MP3 players for the Treo have traditionally done their syncing, at least on Windows PC’s, through Microsoft’s Windows Media Player which is free and built in to the Windows Operating System. Alternately you can simply copy files directly onto an external memory card on your Treo and then let the program search for these files and add them to its library. While this works, it’s far from ideal now that cards with very large capacities are being sold inexpensively and for those of us who have tens of gigabytes of audio files, be they music, audio books, or podcasts. Some people fare well with Windows Media player, but in my brief time trying to use it to sync with my Treo, I had numerous problems, ranging from it recopying files that were already on my device each time I synced, to not copying files that should have been copied, etc. It simply wasn’t reliable.
While there were certainly limitations before that made the earlier Treos not the ideal choice of everyone as an MP3 player, many people have and do use the Treo 650, 600, perhaps even earlier ones still as their only portable music player. The Treo 700P, Palm’s latest version of the Treo, has features that make it a much more powerful device, all the more capable of replacing your primary MP3 player. The main feature that helps make the phone more powerful is its ability transfer data at much higher speeds than previously via a newer wireless (cellular, not Wifi) network technology, called EvDO. While the version of EvDO that's currently available and accessible via the 700P is still not quite as fast as what most people have in their homes via their DSL or Cable Internet connection, it still ranges from three to ten times the speed of a dial-up modem. This speed will improve, especially when future versions of EvDO get deployed. The difference in speed means that your Treo can now stream live video and high-quality audio. You can download applications in seconds rather than minutes. Surfing the web is now a lot more like it is on a broadband connection on a PC, albeit with a much smaller screen. Just as broadband on the PC gives you more freedom to explore the Internet on demand, EvDO on a phone gives you more motivation to use it for accessing the Internet. It used to be that for many uses I would just delay what I needed to do until I got home because doing it on the slow data connection on my phone was too painful. It was only when I knew I wouldn’t be near a PC for a long time and I really needed to get some information on the web that I would use the Treo for accessing a website.
Another key new feature is the Treo 700P's ability to handle memory cards that can hold more than 2GB, the limit of previous Treos. Although installing a hack could let you work around that limit on those older models, it required some degree of technical expertise to do. Now you can just plug in your 4GB SD card and it will work as a 4GB card without any extra work. Presumably when 8GB SD cards and even 16GB and 32GB SD cards come out in the next year or two, these will all work as well without additional software or hacking. While 4GB is still low compared to the storage on some MP3 players, it's large enough to hold dozens of albums worth of music, not too shabby for a card the size of a postage stamp.With these (and many other) new capabilities and a couple of new applications from third-party developers, it looks like the Treo 700P could easily replace an iPod for many people, myself included. The third party applications that I speak of are Motion Apps’ mOcean, CodeWave's myTunesRSS, and Softick’s “Softick Audio Gateway.” There are additional applications that enhance the Treo’s multimedia capabilities worlds above the current iPods, but I’ll tackle those later.
Motion Apps’ mOcean is an MP3 player for the Treo that syncs with your iTunes library and actually has an interface that looks and acts a lot like an iPod. Obviously the Treo doesn’t have the famed iPod “clickwheel,” so instead mOcean provides a graphical version of the clickwheel that you can use via the Treo’s touchscreen. In fact, Apple is rumored to be coming out with similar touchscreen clickwheel interface for a future Video iPod that will do away with the physical clickwheel in order to recoup space for an expanded screen. It almost feels like I have a future iPod in my hands when I’m using mOcean! mOcean actually improves on the iPod in some ways due to the Treo having a keyboard – for example you can skip to the S's in a large list of songs my just hitting the 's' key, rather than have to scroll with the clickwheel until you got all the way to the s's. Although though there are some minor inconsistencies that probably in many cases only advanced iPod/iTunes users would notice, for the most part it is an extremely close replica of the iPod/iTunes experience, and Motion Apps appear to be constantly working on new features and functionality. The only obvious shortfall is the lack of ability to play AAC files and video files, but other programs are available on the Treo that that will do this, like the free TCPMP. 
MyTunesRSS is a streaming server that you run on a PC that’s connected to the Internet. It syncs up with your iTunes library and makes your PC a streaming server for any audio and even video content that is in your iTunes (although for video you have a really good, fast connection for it to work well). For those of us with tens of gigabytes of audio and video files in our libraries, this allows you to have immediate access to your entire library without having to go out and buy ten or twenty 4GB memory cards, or have to wait until they come out with larger capacity cards. Of course, your ability to play these files is dependent on being in an area where you can get a data connection, and probably even an EvDO connection, which is still mostly in major metropolitan areas. So, for those who spend any time traveling or in more rural areas, this may not be a great solution.The other piece of this content puzzle is something that isn’t quite as obvious, but for me was an important factor in realizing that using my Treo for listing to podcasts, audio books and music might be a better solution that using my iPod. If you have an MP3 player like an iPod and you’re listening to music and your cell phone rings, you have to shut off the iPod, take your earbuds out, and answer your phone, all before the caller on the other end hangs up. It can be a bit of a hassle, and if you have to use a handsfree device for your phone it makes it that much harder still. The 700P comes with a handsfree headset that doubles as stereo headphones. This allows you to listen to audio on your Treo, and then when a call comes in, it interrupts your music or podcast or audio book and prompts you to answer the phone, at which point the stereo headphones simply become a handsfree headset through which you can have a conversation. While this makes things a lot easier than having a phone and an MP3 player as separate devices, it still means you need to take the Treo out of your pocket or off your belt in order to answer the call.
Earlier this year, a company that has been making other well-known and useful software for the Treo and other Palm devices for years came out with a way to do this all wirelessly. Some quick background first. The wireless technology which I’m referring to here, and which you’ve undoubtedly heard of by now, is called “Bluetooth.” It was designed specifically for devices to communicate with other devices at short range (30 feet or less) and at relatively slow speeds (much slower than wireless networking known as Wifi). Probably the most popular use for this technology so far is the wireless headsets for cell phones that you might see planted in or over people's ear. If that ear is on the side of their head that's not visible to you, it's easy to initially think they are talking to themselves when they are actually having a phone conversation. While Bluetooth has been very useful for this use, it does not, as you might expect, allow you to listen to audio other than that of a phone call. To listen to stereo music, you need to have a phone and a device that implements something called an Advanced Audio Distribution Profile, or A2DP, which allows wireless digital streaming of different types of digital audio formats fromone device to another. Unfortunately even the latest greatest Treo does not support A2DP. Fortunately for us, the genius programmers at Softick worked around this lack of capability of the Treo so that it could actually do A2DP with compatible Bluetooth stereo headsets that have started to become available in the last year or two. So now you don’t even have to bother with taking the Treo out of your pocket or off of your belt to answer a call while your listening to something. You can do everything wirelessly, including pausing the audio and skipping to the next or previous track. I can see one really nice use of this for me – I can now do yard work with a headset on and keep my Treo on the deck, safe from getting wet or full dirt!A couple of caveats about this should be mentioned, though. While Softick’s program works on previous Treos, it still doesn’t quite work on the 700P. Palm updated the Bluetooth implementation on the 700P, breaking the compatibility, and so now Softick is hard at work trying to come up with a version that will work on the 700P – something that they are hoping to get out in the next week or so. Also, to be fair, you can buy Bluetooth headsets with an attachment that plugs into an iPod. This does add a considerable amount of bulk, though, to the otherwise fairly small iPod, making it a good deal larger than the Treo, although you could also use these on the much smaller iPod Nano.
When Apple came out with the Video iPod, it was the biggest leap in functionality since the first iPod debuted in 2001. The success of the video capability has convinced many movie and television companies to offer video for sale on the iTunes Music Store, or even for free over the Internet. And while mOcean still doesn’t sync video content yet, you can watch both streaming video as well as video files you’ve transferred from your computer to your Treo via a cabled hotsync. Not only that, but you can watch video in many more formats than you can with the iPod. The iPod allows only for a couple of types of Mpeg 4 formats, whereas programs like TCMP and Kinoma allow for AVI, DivX, XviD, and various Mpeg formats.
Finally, through yet additional third-party software and services, you can listen to or view a slew of additional content on your Treo that will not be possible on an iPod unless Apple actually develops an iPod phone that does EvDO, or an iPod with Wifi built in. Orb is a product that lets you use you stream all your audio, video, and even pictures to any computer capable of receiving them, and it has been tested successfully with the Treo 700P. Not only that, but if you have a TV Tuner card in your PC you can actually stream all the live channels you get through that tuner card as well. A similar service/product called Slingbox also will also let you do this, although they are still working on the software that will let you do this with a Treo. For those who subscribe to Satellite Radio, there is a way to use your Treo to stream your XM or Serius channels directly to your Treo. There are other streaming servers like Gloonet, and I’m sure ones that I’ve not even heard of yet, but the ones I’ve listed are probably the best known.The iPod has become so popular for good reasons. It’s not just that it’s had a great marketing force behind it (although it has), or just great looks (that too), or that it was one of the first players to incorporate a hard drive that could store hundreds (or thousands) of songs. It’s also that the user interface on the iPod is for most people a very easy and intuitive one to operate. Its syncing abilities are also easy to set up and understand, at least compared to most other platforms out there. iTunes, the PC part of the iPod, is also pretty streightward and manages music (and now video) in a simple and powerful way.
I realize that some people truly don’t want anything but a small device to play their 30 favorite albums on, and for them, I suppose, an iPod (as well as many other MP3 players) is still a great choice. Heck, for them, anything more than an iPod Nano would be overkill. However, for those of us who are always looking for more powerful gadgets, ones that can serve most if not all of our requirements for a portable device (be they to listen to audio, watch video, make phone calls, read email, etc., etc.) the Treo 700P really is a powerhouse of convergence. With the services and software I’ve mentioned in this article, it can do everything and much more than current iPod models, and with mOcean can even look and act like an iPod. It does this at a price that’s at least equivalent to the top 60GB iPod model (if you buy the Treo 700P along with a 2-year cell phone contract), or at most for a couple hundred more, if paying buying at the top retail price with no discounts. The main disadvantage to the Treo, other than what some people would consider to be it’s inferior look fashion-wise, is the fact that it doesn’t have a big built-in hard drive. While 4GB is a lot for some people, and certainly is still the most you can have on an iPod Nano as of now, it still pales in comparison to the mammoth 60GB hard drive in the top-of-the-line iPod model. With myTunesRSS and other streaming solutions, you can get around this, but you are still dependent on having an EvDO signal, which is still far from ubiquitous. EvDO coverage will increase, of course, as will memory card capacities, making this less of an issue, but for now, some will still consider it too much of a limitation to give up their iPod altogether. Plus, as coverage and storage capacity increases on the Treo, it’s unlikely that the iPod will stand still. The rumor is that a new video iPod with a much larger screen will come out later this year and will make watching video on the Treo look weak in comparison. Along with that bigger screen may come additional features that will remove more advantages of the Treo, such as Bluetooth or Wifi capability.
For right now, though, the Treo does still seem to win in all but storage capacity. Heck, even its battery is replaceable, unlike the infamous non-replaceable iPod’s! I for one am going to ditch my iPod. That doesn't mean I won't be tempted by future ones. If a new one comes out that has a screen twice the size of my Treo's, it's going to be hard to resist. Then again, since I don't watch nearly as much video as I do listen to audio podcasts, audio books, and music, it would be hard to justify having both of these. Hopefully, though, Palm's next Treo will also sport a larger screen, or at least a video output as the iPod does which allows for plugging in video goggles that make screen size irrelevant!
Due to comment spam, your comment will be posted only after it is reviewed, thanks! (21)
1. Brad left...
Wednesday, 28 June 2006 3:01 pm
I just got a treo 700p last week and your article has inspired me to hget
all these little goodies! I had NO IDEA that my Treo was capable of all
this. I really do appreciate you taking the time to write this all out!
Thanks!
2. Kevin Newsome left...
Wednesday, 28 June 2006 10:45 pm
Levi, Fantastic Blog/article on the new fantastic 700p! I am also a
gadget geek who does not even own an iPod and have been trying to use my
Palm PDA's for everything. I listen to music, watch video (DVD and TV)
that I transfer from my PC to a 2GB SD card. I think the MobiTV service is
fantastic for watching TV on my Sprint 700p. I have the PalmOne GPS kit
which has the fantastic Tom Tom 5 software to help me on my out of town
business trips. I sync all my MS Outlook contacts and calendar info to my
700p also. I just recently discoverd the Softick Audio Gateway software
and the Jabra BT620s headset. I think the 700p is the ultimate solution
for most anything to do with multimedia and also most business
applications. Kevin N
3. Dianne left...
Monday, 10 July 2006 11:48 am
I was thinking about buying an ipod, but now will consider the treo.
Thanks for all the effort in posting all this information. Very nice of
you.
One question: My husband and I like to listen to audiobooks together
sometimes. Does the Treo have a speaker so we can both listen?
Thanks!
4. Levi Wallach left...
Monday, 10 July 2006 12:37 pm :: http://twelveblackcodemonkeys.com
Hey Dianne,
5. Steve left...
Tuesday, 11 July 2006 9:05 pm :: http://www.piratesandals.com
Excellent article. I bought the 700p (Verizon) a couple of weeks ago and
have been describing it to my friends as "the phone I have been waiting
for". I use it a lot during the day as a USB tethered modem for my laptop
- impressive download speeds and consistent performance... and with no
missed calls (the data stream is interrupted during the call).
6. darin left...
Friday, 21 July 2006 5:06 pm
i'm sorry. i'm a bit confused. your article says mOcean does not play AAC
files. if that's the case, then what good is syncing your itunes library to
your treo? is there a way to convert AAC files to files that mOcean or
Pocket Tunes can play?
7. Pankaj left...
Sunday, 30 July 2006 7:25 pm
I still think that there is no single device which does phone, music and
video very well. It is probably one step ahead. I heard Apple was going to
make iPod smart phones, it may be what we are looking for but Treo is
definitely not the solution. Try to have more than 1 GB songs on Treo, you
will see a performance hit. Also, it does not provide the iPod style search
and select options. I just moved to a Blackberry from Treo and I am glad
that I did that.
8. Levi Wallach left...
Thursday, 3 August 2006 5:51 am
Darin, sorry, I made an error, mOcean is supposed to be able to play AAC
files, but only those that don't have DRM. The files you buy on iTunes
have DRM, so it wouldn't play these. As for what the point is, I guess
there's no point if you buy your music through iTunes, but I never have.
All my music is ripped from CD. Aside from that, most of my listening
these days is of podcasts which are in pure, open MP3 format, so no
problem...
9. Chris left...
Wednesday, 20 September 2006 6:21 pm
Has anyone been able to make the Softick Audio Gateway work on the 700p? I
can't and it just seems to crash the palm.
10. Luan Do left...
Friday, 13 October 2006 12:19 pm
Thanks to Mr. Wallach's excellent article, I'm giving up the idea of buying
an iPod. I'm getting the multi-talented Treo 700P instead. iPods are
wonderful MP3 players. However, it seems the Treo 700P gives more
capabilities for less. I'll just have to be selective of what songs I load
onto a Treo 700P with a 4GB card with TomTom Navigator mapping software.
12. Chris C left...
Thursday, 17 January 2008 1:10 pm
Great article. Everything I wanted to know about using A2DP with my 700p.
I was considering the Jabra BT8010 bluetooth stereo headset because it can
link to 2 devices simultaneously (treo and ipod) but now I'm seriously
considering scrapping the ipod and using just the treo!