replacement for Treo - SPV?

[Guest mikes99mail]

hi, I've had a treo 600 for over a year and am fed up waiting for Orange to bring out the 650. I've had some issues with the 600 (am on my 8th handset..) so am looking for an alternative. The SPV500 seems to get a lot of mentions on here, so would really appreciate some real-world advice!

The functions I use most on the Treo are my calendar and address book, which are sync'd with my ACT database on my laptop and email. I dont 'send' more than a couple of mails / day, so could cope without the qwerty keyboard of the treo, but I do receive and read > 100 / day on a bad day.

Would an SPV cope with that? I guess the email would be fine, but does anyone on here link it to ACT?

and is there anything else I should know? What's the Battery life like? Is there a useable speakerphone? can you make three way calls? Is the SPV500 the best alternative? (blackberry seems expensive compared to the SPV and I dont think our IT people could cope with push email...)

thanks for all the help, sorry to be asking so many questions on my very first post!

[Guest mikes99mail]

hi,

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Nobody?

[Guest brykins]

hi, I've had a treo 600 for over a year and am fed up waiting for Orange to bring out the 650.

I also used a Treo600 - only for about four months though - and have recently changed to an SPV-C500.....and it does just about everything that the Treo did. If you add on Papyrus as an alternative to the built-in diary/task manager, then it really can be used as an alternative to a "proper" Palm/PocketPC - in fact, my nice shiny new Dell Axim X50v is sitting here on the desk being used a lot less than it ought to be to justify the cost!

As far as sync'ing with Act! goes....no idea! I do now that a client of mine uses Act! and Outlook and there is a routine built into Act! to sync with Outlook....and from there you'll sync to the phone using Activesyc. Not sure if there is a direct route though - if there is, it'll be via third-party sync software I think.

Receiving email is fine on the C500 - remember that the screen is actually a higher resolution than the Treo600 - 176x220 compared to the Treo600's 160x160, so you can get just as much text on screen.

Battery life - mine was awful to start with but I then realised that a third-party alarm application was eating up the battery. Now, with normal use (that's phone calls, texting and general fiddling around with diary and so on) I find that I only charge up every three - four days.

Speaker phone - perfectly useable for me in the office...not sure if it's loud enough for the car though - never tried it.

Three-way calls....never tried them!

Is there a better alternative? Not that I know of - there are PocketPC with phones in them but they are larger and heavier and you may not want to hold one to your ear. There are smaller phones out there and better PDA's without the built-in phone, but do you want to carry two devices? Blackberry? Poor choice of add-on software and that push email....I have heard that it only pushes urgent email instantly and everything else is pushed every fifteen minutes.....you may as well pull from your POP3 server every fifteen minutes in that case.

For me, the C500 is the best phone I've owned and the best combined phone/PDA package I could ask for at the price. It would only be made perfect if it had a 240x320 screen (coming in the C550 soon) and a stylus and touchscreen.

[Guest mikes99mail]

fantastic, thanks Bryan!!

muchos appreciados.