PCS Phone Palm Treo 650 (Sprint)

I've had the Treo 650 for months, and agree with most other raters that it had problems. It reset spontaneously, had 50% less usable memory than the 600 and the phone quality was not as good. Palmone has updated the ROM now and fixed all these problems. My usable memory went from 5 mb to almost 11mb, and the phone is now completely stable. No need for reservations anymore. The ROM update is not yet available for Cingular, but will be, I suppose, eventually.

Highly recommend this phone 10 years later. This is the phone that inspired all smart phones!

Have you ever noticed that you can always talk to a sales person but you always have to wait for a customer serivce person? The same should be true of activation, but my expereicne was so bad I would rather return the phone than take the chance that I might someday need customer service. I am a 'power' phone user--the kind of user companies want becuase I use so many minutes. I currently use ATT. I want to switch. Why? Because I cant get a decent signal between my home and work despite living in a major metropolitan area. So I decided to take a chance with Sprint. OK, so I buy the Sprint via Amazon and I finally receive it today. I charge the phone and call the Sprint number for activation. First, you have to enter a 13 digit number that can be found in teeny-tiny print inside the phone. Supposedly it works by voice recognition, but in my case, it gave up and connected me to a customer service agent. The agent asks for my SSN and surprise, according to their computer I had an account with them eight years ago which had a $29.00 balance. I was told that I need to pay it before I can activate. I explain that I dont recall ever having a sprint phone, but anything is possible since I am a business owner and I may have had a phone for an employee back then. Of course, my explanation didnt matter and they transferred me to collections. Before you can speak to a collections agent, you have to enter your 10 digit PCS number--now in my case I dont have a number, so I was trapped in voice mail hell. I entered 10 zeroes and eventually after sitting in a queue I managed to reach a human being. The agent asks me for my SSN again, pulls up my account, at which time, I said, I will pay the $29.00 under protest and contest it later. The agent then said, "never mind you'll have to call back since our system is down." I said I would rather wait, or have you call me since otherwise I will have to go thru the queue again. I was told I could wait, and was put on hold. The agent evenutally returns and says he is sorry but I'll have to call back. I ask for a supervisor. First the agent says no supervisor is availalbe and I said I'll wait for one. I had to wait about 30 seconds. A woman answers saying she is the superivsor and "can I help you?" I said "I have been on the phone close to 30 minutes now and." Before I could complete the sentence, she says their system is down, she cant help me, and hangs up on me. I swear I never raised my voice. I call the main activation number again. after going tru the same dysfunctional voice recognition, I get a live agent. I explain the problem and the agent says the system is working again and she will trnasfer me to collections. Again I cant enter the PCS number, but eventually I get into a queue and 3 minutes later I am speaking to a new agent in collections. I offer to pay my bill, and then I am told "There is a $5.00 fee to pay by phone!" I said, I am sorry, its bad enough you are making me pay for a charge I am contesting that is eight years old and I will not pay $5.00 for the privilege of paying a $29.00 bill. I asked how I go about paying otherwise, and was put on hold. The agent returned and said "never mind" he will waive the $5.00 charge. How considerate. OK, so now I pay, and then I ask to be transferred back to activation. He says sure, and proceeds to disconnect me, presumably by accident. Well, being persistent, and excited about playing with a new gadget, I called activation a third time. I didnt even bother trying to use the voice recogntion, so I entered the teeny-tiny 13 digit number. Confident that I am finally going to get activated, I put my phone on speaker and waited. Guess what? I was disconnected again! By this time I'm thinking that my ATT phone isnt so bad after all, but being a glutton for punishment, I called a fourth time. This time I did eventually reach an activation agent at which time I was informed that their system doesnt show posted payments for twelve hours! "Please call back." I am done calling Sprint. I intend to return my phone to Amazon tomorrow. I would rather use two cans and a string than have to put up with another customer service nightmare. I hope enough of you reading this will choose another carrier, and maybe Sprint will realize that it's time to fix its broken system.

I have used the handspring deveices and loved the Treo 300. Still think that design is superior if you have to carry around a brick to talk on. The 600 and 650 series was a nice change. The 650 addresses the limitations and flaws of the 600. There are still a lot of BUGS on this device. The reviewer who states that it retarts frequently is not kidding. How can you be used to that chaos? I am a Mac user so am not used to crashes, maybe that is it. This 650 device crashes when I check mail each time. The speakerphone drops in and out and the keys are now so close together typing is impossible for anyone who can palm a basketball. I have called Sprint and they said the mail crashes it's on my server. Also when dding contacts it crashes. Each function it seems to have crashed at leasty once. Well, Blackberry works fine on my server and there are not many options to the mail management so something is wrong with the application. Updates are not easy unless you have the correct cable. [...]

The Treo 650 generall works, but is a collection of random software packages that were not designed cohesively, and it's still pretty buggy and unreliable. The number one problem with the device is the VersaMail e-mail program that will ocassionally crash and blow away all your e-mail and e-mail configurations. This is especially fun while you're on the road for business. When the device crashes hard, in some cases it can be put into a looping reboot that is not easily recoverable. The steps on the PalmOne support site instruct you to blow away all your data, then download a THIRD PARTY tool to go in an manually remove some databases, then reinstall all your data. This is unacceptable in a consumer device. Poor software quality and design makes the Treo 650 a hard device to rely on.

I'm a new Treo user. And I like the phone... the button are bigger. I wish it had voice dialing like my old Samsung i500... but after owning it for 4 days... the buttons jammed on my Treo already! Amazon has reacted quickly... but how can the phone already break... Right now the 2 button and the 5 button are jammed to the point that it won't let the phone dial. I hope my new Treo does not have the same problem. Anyone else face this?