Toshiba Portege G710

I recently decided that Vodacom is over charging me, so I downgraded my contract and opted not to take a cell phone at all. I'd rather use my current Palm 750 until it dies, if that happens I have my eye on this little smartphone from Toshiba. It is not full of features as the Treo 750 but I found that I rarely use those features, so for the price this smartphone is on the money.

GSpace

A colleague I work with mentioned the GSpace service to me a while back but I never thought it will be of any benefit to me. The idea behind GSpace is simple, it allows you to upload files to your GMail account as if it was just another off site storage medium.

I have my own always online off site server so I never saw the need for yet another. What I did not know was that GSpace not only uploads the files to GMail but it simulates standard email, thus I can use the standard GMail features to manipulate these files.

The benefit only came to full realization when I used GSpace to backup my Excel and Word documents from my new Palm Treo 750 to GMail. I can now access any of my Word or Excel documents anywhere plus I can edit them using the standard Google documents feature, so updating my documents via the web is easy and when I sync with my Palm I just download the latest versions of the documents from GMail onto the Palm again.

It is a bit manual at this point in time but it works surprisingly well.

Spb Software

I have been using my new Palm Treo 750v for a while now and I bought a few applications already. I will not be able to use my Treo without these applications anymore.

Most of my applications were developed by Spb Software but I did buy a simple list manager from PDA House. My current list of must have software is

• Spb Diary
• Spb GPRS Monitor
• Spb Mobile Shell
• My Checklist

I am investigating Spb Phone Suite but my Palm Treo 750v has most of the functionality it offers so $20 just for the profile management is a bit steep. I mailed Spb Software to find out if they could re-package Spb Phone Suite into a Spb Phone Suite Lite version for $10.

MMS support on the Treo 750v

So I received an MMS but my phone refused to download the MMS from the server. My MMS settings was not setup out of the box. Very disappointing for a Vodafone branded phone, I am definitely not impressed.

I phoned Vodacom SA to try and get the correct settings from them but they failed to give me the correct information to setup my MMS.

Luckily a friend of mine had the same problem with his HP PDA Phone so I mailed him and he pointed me to this forum post.

Unfortunately it still did not work but luckily I only needed to make one small change, the gateway server IP and port needs to be supplied for the Treo 750v to work. Thus 196.6.x.x became 196.6.x.x:9201.

A bit of a headache just to send and receive MMS messages.

MIDP 2.0 Support on my Treo 750v

The first thing I noticed of my new phone was that it is missing J2ME support. Luckily other people had the same problem than me and I quickly found the solution in Intent Midlet Manager for Windows Mobile.

So now I can use my standard GMail client as well as Opera Mini.

Palm Treo 750v

It seems Vodacom SA is Vodafone obsessed lately. I asked Vodacom SA to supply me with a Palm Treo 750 and they insist on giving me the Palm Treo 750v. Unfortunately for me the only way to get the Palm Treo 750 is to switch service providers, so I took the Treo 750v.

Lucky according to the comparison between the two Treos the only lacking thing on the 750v is HSDPA. That and the fact that my default theme is red and gray.

Treo 750

It is cell phone contract upgrade time again and this time I am getting the Palm Treo 750. It has Windows Mobile 5.0 as OS and not the standard PalmOS, which in my opinion is dying and needs a major rework. To me Windows Mobile is the only mobile OS that is still evolving and growing. Symbian and PalmOS are both not really growing and as with anything if it is not growing it is dying.

I still do prefer the Palm devices over the other devices from other manufacturers because of the design principles followed by the Palm company and the Palm Treo 750 seems to be the perfect device for me. The small thumb keyboard to me is better than the HTC TyTN's keyboard because it allows me to type SMS messages with just one hand without the need to flip the phone sideways to get access to the keyboard.

For larger documents etc. I am investigating a way of hacking my iPAQ bluetooth keyboard to work with my Treo 750, so meeting notes etc. will not be a big problem.

Some missing functionality I would have liked on this device is

• WiFi
• 3" LCD screen instead of 2.5"
• 320x240 resolution instead of 240x240
• 2MP camera instead of 1.3MP
• 400MHz CPU instead of 300MHz
• Have a docking station included as part of the package

Unfortunately the Treo 750 is on back order, so I might get the phone on the 12th of June.