I’m going to Heart Rhythm this year without my laptop for the first time in three years. In fact, it’s probably the first time I’ve gone much of anywhere without a laptop, and I’m looking forward to having a ligher load. I acquired a few items yesterday that should help me work without it, which I’ll talk a bit more about in the next post.
Category Archives: Treo
Treo 650 Data and Bluetooth are Power Hungry
My new Treo 650 kept running out of battery power in less than a day, despite claimed standby time of several days. Yesterday I came up to my parents’ house in Mandeville, and realized that I had no charger with me, so I did something desperate: I turned off bluetooth and my email program on the Treo. Guess what? 24 hours later I still have around 80% battery life! I guess those features really are power-hungry.
Posting through Bluetooth and My New Treo 650
With three sales tax free days, some free time to get accustomed to a new device, and a dying Treo 600, I finally bit the bullet and just bought the Treo 650. This means that I can now use my phone as a modem over Bluetooth, and I get a connection speed of around 75 kbps according to 2wire. This is phenomenal, as it means that I don’t need to find a WiFi connection for basics like e-mail, blogging, and reading blogs as long as my phone has a connection.
Even though some of that stuff can be done from the phone itself (which is totally sweet, by the way) it’s nice when available to use my PowerBook instead. It has a 1440×900 17″ wide screen and a full-sized keyboard. This is definitely not the case with the Treo.
The camera seems to be much better than on the Treo 600. It works much better in low light situations. The Treo 600 camera was basically useless unless you were outside in broad daylight.
Here’s a picture I snapped of some graffiti in New Orleans:
It seems there’s an thug artist who shares my name in the city.
As you may have inferred from the title, this post and the upload of the photo have been done using my Treo’s connection over Bluetooth. I happen to think that’s pretty cool.
New Treo with Linux?
As I mentioned in my previous post, my Treo 600 sustained some damage to the screen. While it’s okay now, it may spread. Anyway, it looks like if I need to replace it, I should perhaps get a Treo 650 after all. Soon, I should be able to run linux on it and with a working phone!
Combined with my external keyboard, this would be fantastic.
Back to Bloglines
For all of Robert Scoble’s complaints about Bloglines, it fits my needs quite well. I have been using it for some time now, but I took a break and tried running Gregarius on my server.
It has some nice features, but after several weeks I have given up on its current manifestation. It has a lot of potential, but for now it’s not ready for my needs. The clincher is that I can’t read my feeds on my Treo 600 using Gregarius. It’s way too slow — there’s no WAP/low-bandwidth mode. Bloglines works quite well in that respect.
So long Gregarius, it’s been fun. Maybe I’ll try it again in six months or so.
technorati tags: aggregators, rss, gregarius, oss, foss