my Treo 680

Treo 680 battery tips

2008-01-27T12:31:00.000-08:00

Treo full charge problem

The first thing I've noticed when started to use the Treo, that it never charged fully the battery. Being connected to the charger the phone changes it's led color from red light to green light, when fully charged. Checking the battery charge status (by taping the battery icon in the right upper corner) showed "Battery: 100%". But making the same check right after disconnecting the phone from charger gave the unsatisfying "Battery: 96%" result... I think that is unacceptable.

My Treo charge problem solution

I have been reading about Li-Ion batteries and their life cycle. What I know for sure these batteries do not need formating, like the old timer 16 hour first charge "do it or loose it".

But I new a trick from my laptop. Even if the Li-Ion battery does not like to be drained to 0%, it must be done once in a while for the sake of the computer.

What is the meaning of this nonsense? Well the computer adapts is battery measuring system to the battery's minimum and maximum charge. This way it knows what charge percentage to show for the battery.

I suspect Treo works this way. So, the Treo's battery measuring system needs calibration. I have done the following steps:

Step1. Drain the battery until the phone shuts down. (I did that by enabling bluetooth, and palying music through pocket tunes from the SD card).

Step2. Connect the Treo to the charger and fully charge it (do not disconnect the charger until the led changes to green color).

For me it worked, since than my phone shows "Battery: 99%" after a full charge.

Advice

It is not good for Li-Ion batteries to fully discharge them. Do not repeat this procedure often. Li-Ion batteries like to be charged as often as possible, so charge your phone often. But you can read this also in palm's Treo manual. Take care and have a full charge!

Treo 680 freezes when answering an incoming call?

2008-01-06T16:31:00.000-08:00

Just after a few days of usage I was very disappointed. My brand new smartphone froze when picked up a phone call.

Symptoms

Could not connect the freeze event to any contact or other event. It was freezing randomly no matter if I was using the hardware button or touch screen to receive the call. Nothing could be done on freeze but removing the battery and do a soft reset. Tried to google for a solution and no lasting solution found. Of course Palm has nothing to say about this on their support page... After all this is a perfect phone. Users are imperfect provoking those nasty errors and freezes.

Solution no. 1 - not working for me

By desperately searching the net I found a discussion board saying that the error is provoked by the Date & Time setting set to automatically from the mobile network. Well on my unlocked Treo did not made the magic. Freezes kept coming randomly as they did before.

Solution no. 2 - did not bother to try

Changing the sim card. Someone was writing that he asked for a new sim card from the mobile operator. For a few days he had some luck but according to his posts after a week he had to face the freeze symptom again.

Solution no. 3 - did not bother to try

Changing the phone. I saw board postings of people who asked for replacement phones even two times, and that did not change their problem.

Solution no. 4 - not working for me

I was reading about the database integrity is not okay on the phone and should be checked with a small program. Did that and believe me nothing wrong has been found on my Treo 680.

Solution no. 5 - did not bother to try

Hard reseting the device and than try to use it without installing any app. See if it freezes. I suppose Palm did that before releasing their product :) I don't have time for that.

Solution no. 6 - working for me so far since 29th december 2007

I was reading a post about someone who has been speaking with the palm support guy. According to the post after long soft reset and hard reset sessions palm said its a data issue. In other words help yourself we cannot help you.

Okay I had a clue... I already had some data issue with palm when putting on my contacts. I know Palm OS hates unicode characters. What if my Address Book has a few of them?

I made a hot sync, and took my computer opened Palm Desktop to check my contacts one by one. And there it was.

I had contacts with strange looking categories. Checked the categories and found a few suspect records with name END:VCARD, and others having strange characters like this √. I deleted them. Interesting to know that there was no trace of these categories on my Treo. Did a Hot Sync again and since then I have no freezes when picking up calls on my Treo.

Conclusion

The Treo 680 gives us users the false feeling we can receive all kind of data through USB, IR, or BLUETOOTH but be careful. So far it seems to me, the characters it can handle is limited. Checking the received or imported VCARDS or CONTACT DATA might save you from a few unwanted freezes.

Importing contacts to Treo 680

2008-01-01T06:37:00.000-08:00

Well, i thought this will be easy but it caused me some headache to figure out how to put all my contacts from my Sony Ericsson T610 to Treo 680.

Before Treo 680

I have been keeping all my phone book copy on my computer. Just for the record my comp is a mac. It was extremely easy to synchronize my old phone with the OS X built in Address Book using the built in iSync. I had an address book containing complex info like phone, address, email, web, birthday. My phone could only sync the phone, and email info. I had to find a way to put the address book from my computer to my Treo.

Trying to use iSync

Palm devices are also iSync compatible and they can be synchronized this way but there is a small problem... and nobody is mentioning about that. I suspect Treo does not support unicode characters. I have the feeling it supports the ASCII character set and when it has to deal with unicode starts to behavior strangely.

In my case that's a tragedy. I have a lot of hungarian names in my address book. When tried to synchronize the address book did not get entirely to my Treo. Every sync attempt ended up in failure, with only a few records getting on the Treo. I suspect the records containing special characters like [ie: ő,ű] causing the failure.

So I gave up on the iSync possibility since it did not appear reliable enough.

Trying to export

Next choice was using the Palm desktop software for sync. But how to get those records from the Address Book software to Palm desktop software?

Well I chose the export to vCard option. This resulted in a long VCF file. This is a plain text file that can be opened with any text editor.

Opened the VCF file with a text editor and manually made a find and replace for each character I thought being a potential source of problem. [ie: replaced ű with u, ő with o and so on]. It took me a while to finish that. Had to be very careful not to change the tab and line break formating of the file.

Importing to Palm desktop

After the preparations I have imported the VCF file into the Palm Desktop software. Everything looked almost right. But I noticed a few records being mixed up. Realized that I missed a few unicode characters to replace. Did the replace, imported again and everything worked like a charm.

Synchronizing to Treo

It was just a button push on the sync cable... It worked and I had the whole contact list on my Treo in a few seconds. I still do not like the Palm Desktop software as much I liked OS X Address Book but it will do as a backup utility.

Got a brand new Treo 680

2007-12-28T16:21:00.001-08:00

I always liked Palm handhelds. Found them more user friendly than any other handheld I have tested. Even thou their hardware is not on the top and it misses the most recent technologies, I would give my vote for Palm.

My first palm was an M505. Quite a piece. Nice design easy to use, very stable and long lasting battery. It has been used for three years in our family, not to mention I bought it from second hand.

My second palm was a T5, which was a nice one. But I've got tired of using a phone and a separate handheld device. I was thinking for a smartphone. Smart as my Palm T5 and Phone as my Sony-Ericsson T610.

iPhone was an option but somehow I did not trusted it's capabilities on replacing every palm capability...

This way my next thought was a Palm smartphone.

However the only unlocked version without the super complicated Windows CE was the Treo 680. So now I have it. Curious what our common future will be like?