Treo 700w

So I picked up a new Treo 700w on the way home from CES. There are a few things that are bugging me.

1) Verizon requires me to sign a two year contract. I know most of you are probably used to that idea, but in my mind contracts like that are SO 1990! I’ve been with Cricket for 6 years because they don’t require a contract of me. The whole idea that Verizon is going to lock me into a revenue stream for them urks me. 6 months I could understand, but 2 YEARS!?!?!!? That means I’m saying that for the next 2 years the only phone gadgets I’m going to buy will be with Verizon so Sprint, T-Mobile, etc – you better not have a cooler phone than Verizon cause I’m stuck! I’m sure as hec not going to be using the Treo 700w in 2 years. I wish the stinking cell phone companies would look at Cricket and copy their model – or boost mobile or trac-phone or whatever. Pre-Paid is the way to go in my mind. I sure hope the major cell companies get on board.

2) This one really gets under my skin. When I was at CES I was at the Palm booth looking at the Treo 700w asking all kinds of questions. The most important question for me was whether the Treo could be tethered to my PC or Mac to allow me to use the broadband wifi as a modem. He guaranteed me that I could so I was very excited. As I’m closing the deal at Verizon, I mentioned that the most important thing to me was that I could tether it. The Sales guy said ‘oh, I think you can natively but Verizon is disabling that feature, if I want to do that I need to buy an AirCard. Here’s the thing – the manufacturer is telling me about all the great features on this phone, getting me all excited about it. Then Verizon goes and disables or cripples several of the coolest features. Why did they cripple the tethering? Well, they told me straight up that it was because if I wanted to do that then Verizon wants to make more money off me. The air card is around $150 and the service for tethering is $75.00/month. The only service provider for the Treo 700 is Verizon. So, they got an exclusive then decided to cripple the dang thing
3)configuring

3) My other compaint is that the menu system is kinda tough to use, but that is just because it’s on Windos CE and I’m not Palm OS.

4) So far I love it! (other than items 1-3) I especially like that it will collect all my mail, calendars, etc.