Nothing's perfect. I knew going in that I would have to add stuff to my Treo 650 to get it just the way I wanted it. What surprised me was that I didn't have to change nearly as much as I thought I would. The Treo 650 is as close to "right" out of the box as any PDA I've seen. I was also surprised at the stuff I thought I'd use that I'm not using after all. So if you're interested in getting the most out of your Treo, here's what works for me.
What I Added
ZLauncher: This was a must. With only 23MB of storage heap "RAM" in the 650, I knew I'd need the ability to launch most of my programs from the SD card. Not all of them; some fairly hefty programs like PocketTunes, Audible and even ZLauncher itself have to remain in RAM. But ZLauncher, unlike PowerRun, the runner-up for this task, lets me both create shortcuts for applications that need to think they live in RAM and run other apps from the more standard /palm/launcher folder on the card, and categorize all of them as I see fit. Also, I get a Pocket PC-like Today screen and the ability to skin the launcher to customize it as I see fit. I also love the QuickLaunch feature, which allows me to popup a list of frequently used and favorite applications from anywhere by just pressing the side button.
Profiles: This freeware prefs panel is a lot more powerful than it looks. The profiles you set up here can change nearly everything about your Treo system settings. For example, I have a profile called "Night" that dims the screen, switches my color scheme to "Midnight," cranks the alarms to wake me up in the morning and extends my Auto-Off timeout to 3 minutes. This kicks in automatically Sunday through Thursday at 11pm, then switches back to whatever I had before at 5am. I have a profile called "Work" that mutes the speaker, brightens the screen (darn fluorescent lights) and turns on "Stay on in cradle" that kicks in only during an appointment with the name of my company in it, then reverts at the end of the appointment. I have a profile called "Movie" that dims the screen to just above off, mutes the speaker and forces on the keyboard backlight during any appointment with "movie" in the description. For ad hoc situations, you can also pop up a list of profiles by pressing and holding a hot key. Read the manual on this one, you won't believe what it can do. And by the way, it's free.
Pocket Tunes: I've talked before about how cool Pocket Tunes is, but it's even better on the Treo. In addition to all the cool stuff I could do with this on my T5, now I can stream Shoutcast feeds. I'd tried to do this on my T5, but the Bluetooth connection was too slow and I ended up buffering most of the time, not listening to music. Now I can open up a Shoutcast audio feed (btw, Pocket Tunes is much easier to use with the keyboard, just hitting the O button to bring up the open dialog), throw Pocket Tunes into the background and listen to hours of fresh music. This has completely changed the way I think about carrying music with me. I don't bother with music files on my 1GB SD card anymore. I have podcasts on the card, but why listen to the same 20 or songs over and over again (or lug around an iPod in addition to your Treo, with a different set of earbuds, ick) when you can get new tunes anytime you want? I might change my tune (ha!) on this if the Shoutcast feeds start inserting commercials, but for now, I'll pull my music right out of the air like that old thing, whaddaya call it… Radio.
Card Export II: It didn't take me long after switching over to the Treo from the T5 to miss Drive Mode. I tried using a USB card reader, but too often I'd leave my desk without remembering to take the card out of the reader and put it back in my Treo. One lunch sans podcasts convinced me I had to install Card Export II. Like Drive Mode on the T5, this application mounts your SD card as a USB flash drive on any PC that supports USB flash drives, running Windows, Mac OS or Linux. You don't have do add anything to the PC to make this work.
CardKeeper: This is a tiny little freeware program, but useful. Now that I don't have to remove my SD card to use SyncToy, I have CardKeeper set to beep and carry on if my SD card leaves the socket. You only have to accidentally eject your SD card once to see the value here.
GoodLink: This one wasn't my call. My Treo is issued by work, and we use GoodLink on all our Treos to communicate with our Exchange servers. I mention it here because I want to point out how well this works with Exchange, up to and including Blackberry-style push email. If you're using Exchange for your back-end server solution, GoodLink and Treos are so, so much better than Blackberries.
Resco Explorer: I used this all the time on my T5 and it's just as useful on the Treo. I can do lots of things with this that I can't do with ZLauncher's file manager, like edit stuff in my Saved Preferences file, the "registry" of Palm OS. I had to reduce the font size a bit on my Treo and move the folder tree to the left side to compensate for the smaller screen.
Resco Backup: Backup program that works beautifully with NVFS. I've recanted on my "don't need to backup" thing. 'Nuff said.
DiddleBug: The Treo doesn't have the Palm Notepad application. Not only does this fill that gap, not only is it free, but it does a whole lot more than Notepad. It supports countdown alarms and "Intellibooger" plugins (don't ask) that allow you to quickly and easily create new appointments, tasks and stuff straight from your sketches.
BatteryLine: I missed the ability on my T5 to just tap on the clock and get a quick look at a my battery level. Battery Line puts a small line along one entire edge of the screen than gets shorter as your battery level goes down. Mine a thin red line taking up just the very top row of pixels on my screen, which on the Treo 650 screen, is really tiny. But it's enough get an "at a glance" look at my battery level in just about any application.
KeyCaps600: This is a little freeware app that greatly speeds up typing on the Treo keyboard. Instead of pushing Option and then a key to get to punctuation, I just quickly doubleclick the key. If I hold a key down for about a quarter-second, it auto-capitalizes.
What I Didn't
Not all of the programs I thought I'd install on my Treo actually made the cut. In my initial research, a lot of applications looked promising but when I actually tried them out, not so much. But don't let me stop you. Lots of Treo users love these applications, so try them out for yourself.
BrightCam: I had high hopes for this one, but it just didn't work very well for me. Mostly, I think it just never agreed with me on how bright the screen should be and I couldn't adjust it into compliance. No biggie. Profiles does what I need.
PowerRun: While this does what ZLauncher does as far as running applications from the card, there's a lot of stuff I really like about ZLauncher that makes it worth the extra space it takes up over PowerRun.
TreoGuard: This application basically does two things. It extends your keyguard to many of the buttons on the keyboard so you don't accidentally mash them with your face while on a call and hang up, and it lets you use MP3 ringtones. I've never been a big ringtone guy, so I don't really care about that one, and I tend to use my Treo for calls almost exclusively with either a headset or the speakerphone. I just don't have it up to my face enough to get anything out of TreoGuard.
Headcold: Headcold redirects the speaker output to a pair of headphones when they're plugged in. A pair of headphones. I use a phone headset pretty much exclusively, and Headcold does nothing for that. For a phone headset, the Treo does what Headcold does for headphones automatically.
Butler: This is a big pile of features, and some of them are actually pretty useful. It provides MP3 ringtones, multiple repeating alarms, a really persistent attention grabber if you miss calls or alarms, enhanced keyguard and quick app switching with the volume rocker. Basically, it's a more feature-packed alternative to TreoGuard. But I ended up passing on this for much the same reasons. I have quick application switching through ZLauncher's QuickLaunch and I don't need the rest.
Initiate: Made by the same guy as Butler, this is a launcher designed for smartphones. It gives quick access to your contacts and makes it easy to dial as well as the standard program launcher stuff. I just like ZLauncher better.
Resco Locker: This started out in the first list, but I removed it today. Resco Locker lets you permanently lock stuff into the Dbcache on NVFS devices, which should confer stability and performance improvements. In my case, I run so much stuff that the space taken up by locked apps was more trouble than it was worth.
Chatter: I wanted to like this one. I really did. I even set up an IMAP mail store and forwarded my Gmail to it so I could get the push email that Chatter is known for. But in the end, it just wasn't worth it. The application was a pain to set up, took up too much of my 23MB and really, I'm just fine using Blazer to read my Gmail and VersaMail (in ROM, not taking up much RAM) when I occasionally have to send out attachments.
I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For…
I'm not done looking for software to enhance my Treo. Notably, I'm still looking for a really good call filtering program that works on the 650. There's a few out there for the 600, but they all seem to have issues with the 650. I want to be able, at the very least, to have callers with blocked or unknown Caller ID or incoming toll-free numbers not ring at all and go straight to voicemail. Anyone have any ideas?
I'll keep looking, and when I find more cool stuff, I'll be sure and mention it in the 1SRC podcast.
