Quandary. I wanted to include a picture of my new phone in this Clean Desk Challenge report #16. However, my new phone is also my current photo taking device.

After months of moving in this direction, getting a “smartphone” finally moved high enough on the priority list to happen. I got a Palm Treo 755p and so far, I’m quite pleased with it.

For one, this one device replaced my five year old phone and a low-end Palm PDA with a very squirrely writing pad.

What I like about it:

• touchscreen navigation
• having access to my full address book for phone calls – yay!
• no stylus writing
• stylus tapping when convenient
• almost identical interface to my PDA
• have a basic camera (especially while my camera still out for the count)
• in Contacts, I can start typing first or last name
• the menus make it pretty easily customizable. For example, adding speed dials to the phone interface
• I can program the short cut buttons to call up 2 different commonly used applications (button or alt+button)
• it syncs in less than 30 seconds (previous Palm Zire took several minutes when transferring images

What I’m not liking–and this may be that I haven’t figured out how to do these, but I think it just doesn’t do them:

• in Contacts, typing in the company won’t connect with the record (for real!!). You have to know the person’s name. As far as I’m concerned, this is sheer madness! Forever being the optimist, I’m still holding on to a shred of hope that I’m missing something. There is a system-wide search function which will turn up a contact by business, but not through Contacts.
• Verizon disabled bluetooth connectivity for sync-ing to my Mac. I resent having to carry around a cable, and I don’t want another cable hanging around my desk. Bad call, Verizon. [2/26/08 update - Yes it does!]
• I can’t find how to rearrange the icons in the Home view. I’d like to position them by my own preference.

That’s it for now.