Category: Treo

At the mercy of excessive choice

I want a new cell phone. In fact, my Treo 700p, at a solid 3 years old, may be old enough that I could say I *need* a new cell phone.

Apple isn’t even an option–with their hostile attitude toward non-Apple software interfacing with the iPhone, I will never be able to work with it effectively in Linux. So no go.

That leaves Android.

Normally I wouldn’t worry excessively about whether my phone was upgradeable, but the just-released Android 2.2 sees such a significant performance boost for so many applications, it becomes _even more_ important on an older, slower phone.

In order to be sure, I’m only considering phones of a very recent vintage, since those are the only ones that seem sure to get a FroYo upgrade–phones from some manufacturers that are a mere six months old aren’t getting updates, so I am wary. I want to hear a commitment from the manufacturer *first*.

I happen to have Sprint right now, but I’m not wedded to them. They do have the cheapest data plans around, and I live in one of the first WiMAX areas in the country, so their 4G phones are attractive.

I’ll have to see–so far every phone I’ve looked at has had *some* wart that has kept me from committing to anything yet–but right now it looks like the Samsung Epic 4G (complete with real keyboard!) might be the phone I’m looking for. Only time will tell.

If you want SSH for your Treo 600

I recommend, so far, “TuSSH”:http://staff.deltatee.com/~angusa/TuSSH.html. It is not perfect, but it does do SSH2, which the old standby “TGSSH”:http://online.offshore.com.ai/~iang/TGssh/ does not. I have not used TuSSH a bunch, but it appears adequate, at least for the very low-use I intend.

There are at least two other commercial alternatives, “Mocha Telnet”:http://www.mochasoft.dk/palm.html (which you can try before you buy–I have not done so yet, so I can’t tell you how good or bad it is) and Expand Beyond’s “PocketAdmin Console”:http://www.xb.com/products/pocketadmin/console/, for which a 30 day eval is available. I’ll probably get around to trying both at some point–the fact is, I’m willing to pay for a good enough app, but it will have to display significant benefits over TuSSH.