Help me choose: Treo 680 or Nokia E61?
recently submitted a journalist purchase discount form for a Treo 680. I’ve always wanted to own a Treo for the longest time but could never justify the price. Sadly too, the Treo was never available for free on my carrier whenever I had the chance to renew my postpaid line subscription.
So recently I did have that chance to get a 30% discount for the 680 - I knew that this device would be the nth iteration of the Treo series which meant that it would be as stable as ever. And c’mon, it’s a Treo!
Now here’s the thing. I also found out that I’m due for a line renewal (December 26 2006) which means that I can now avail of a new phone. No Treo on the listing though but with my plan, an extra $100 gets me the Nokia E61, which fellow geeks have been raving about.
Now nothing against Nokia, but I’ve had some bad experiences with hanging and the Symbian platform after having been a Sony Ericsson convert. And then I read this forum thread (of all places, a Macintosh forum!) and saw how versatile the E61’s Symbian platform can be.
Things to consider:
I originally wanted a Treo because of the ease of use. No WiFi, no HSDPA compatibility, but at least the user interface compares to none
I beta test games that are compatible with the Palm OS platform (none for the E61, so this would be a small loss - games, games! Oh how I love games!)
I will really benefit from the E61’s WiFi, UMTS and push email. These are the three connectivity options that are holding me back from purchasing the Treo. So it really has to do now with ultimate ease of use versus connectivity (productivity) options.
The 680’s form factor is much cooler that the wide E61.
I guess the choice is pretty obvious now. Maybe I’m just blinded by that “American Dream” which Treo users keep talking about when it comes to the best inegration between PDA and cellphone. What do you think?
You can compare the specs between the Treo 680 and Nokia E61 here.
At this point I have made a 360 degree turn in choice for the Nokia E61.
posted by feroheep at
10:53 AM
1 Comments:
I just got an e61 about a week ago. i was a devout treo user (cingular gsm) but have determined that while it's a great PDA, it is a terrible phone.
The voice quality is horrible--i'm constantly being told people can't hear me and often i can't hear them. It crashes daily and is poorly integrated with bluetooth headsets. The bright side being that i use goodlink, and it's very tightly integrated and fast. I used versamail for another account and it's a pretty lousy interface. Also very slow.
Finally it's no secret that the treo is moving to run windows mobile which I'm not crazy about. So seemed like a dead end to me.
So that said, i went out searching for a better phone. The Nokia e61 came up as a real "phone" that also has a great OS as a PDA. I was also interested in using its wifi access for voip calls.
After a week I am generally very happy. I have just two complaints. (1) it's a little sluggish sometimes, probably because it's running some java mobile apps which tend to load slowly. (2) the goodlink integration is lousy on it.
For issue #1, there's nothing to do but get used to it. Opening an email isn't snappy like it was on the treo. I have the latest firmware but that didn't help out. It's tolerable but not ideal.
For issue #2, the built-in (free) Mail for Exchange push mail is prety good. The only drawback from my point of view is that there is no sync on the tasks/notes as with goodlink. It integrates well with the phone though.
The music player is great (just started using it) as are the apps that are available for it. I also just set it up to use VOIP using sipphone with is just amazing. The integration is seamless although you may have trouble depending on your firewall/nat situation. My cell carrier also seems to block access to the ports required to run sipphone so it only works with wifi. I also am running iSkoot to use skype. So far that is nice as well but not integrated in the phone like the SIP support is.
Oh and a minor point--in the week of using the phone very heavily (as both a phone and a pda) it has NEVER crashed. As a treo user I went through 4 phones (bad hardware quality) and a crash a day. This is a pretty good thing to have.
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