Palm - Treo 755P Cell Phone Review

I bought the Palm Treo 755p in January of 2008.  I still have it, for the sole reason that I am not eligible yet to get a new phone with my wireless plan.  I am pretty busy, so it was important to me to have a really good calendar on my cell phone.  The calendar and the internet are the primary reasons I decided to go with a smart phone.

Things I like:

1) The text messages get arranged in conversations just like an instant messaging chat log.  This is a great feature!

2) The calendar is great - nice and detailed, and it can sync with Outlook.  I also like how I can categorize my appointments and color code them (yeah, yeah, I'm a nerd).

3) It has google maps, so I can look stuff up on the go.  This has come in handy many times.

4) The internet browser is pretty decent.  It has a hard time with really big pages, but for mobile applications (e.g.: m.facebook.com and m.gmail.com) it's fine.  

5) The battery can get me through a whole day.

Things I don't like:

1) I kept hanging up on people with my cheek because of the touch screen.  I ended up disabling the touch screen while in calls.

2) The keys stopped working perfectly almost immediately.  It started with the "R" button - I would have to mash it down as hard as I could just to get an "R" to show up in my text.  But of course, when I mashed it down that hard, I would end up with three or four "R"s on my screen that I would then have to delete.  The problem has since spread to the majority of the keys, including the "send" and "end" buttons.  Usually I have to push the "send" button several times before it will actually answer a call.  Very frustrating, and my texting has been reduced to turtle speeds because I have to mash down keys and then go back and fix the errors.  I don't know what I'll do when my "delete" button starts to go.

3) The email feature was a big disappointment.  You don't have the option of receiving your emails in real time, and I could never get it to not download every single piece of mail I have ever received when it would check my mail.  Considering I have over five thousand archived emails in my account, this is a serious problem.  I ended up forgoing using the email feature at all, and just checking my mail using the web browser.

4) This phone can't send or receive picture messages.  And it doesn't notify you if someone does try to send you a picture message.  It ends up in some wireless picture message black hole somewhere, which sucks, because then the person who sent me the message thinks I'm ignoring them.

Bottom line:

I do not recommend this phone.  Hopefully Palm learned from this blunder and has fixed these issues for the Pre.