HOUSTON BUSINESS REVIEW

COST-EFFECTIVE IT: CELL PHONE 2005
By Richard Sonnier

Houston Business Show Commentator Richard Sonnier, of the Information Technology Services firm Nimble Services, provides weekly information on our show about information technology issues. Mr. Sonnier can be reached at 281.445.4800 x 250 or via email.

This week I will discuss the latest cell phone technologies.

Cell Phone Upgrade

After two years of service, my old cell phone, a Treo 300 smart phone, had become unreliable, so last week I purchased a new Treo 650. The technology improvement is tremendous. Treo 650 features:

• Digital camera
• Music player
• Memory expansion
• Bluetooth support
• Vastly improved phone features
• 312 Mhz processor (10 times faster than the Treo 300)

Walt Mossberg writes the Personal Technology column for the Wall Street Journal and his verdict is "The Treo is better than ever."

Treo 650 Performance

For 2 years now, I have been forwarding my email to my Treo 300 so that I can keep up with my business wherever I go. On the Treo 300 the email is a little slow. For example, I tend to get about 2000 emails per week and much of it is junk. When I deleted a week's worth of email on my Treo 300 it took over 15 minutes. On my Treo 650 the same operation takes less than a minute. With this type of performance, the Treo 650 is a much more functional device than previous smart phones.

Treo 650 Memory

Compared to the Treo 300, the Treo 650 offers only 50% more memory. The Treo 300 had 16 megabytes while the Treo 650 offers 23 megabytes. However, the Treo 650 uses nonvolatile memory, and that is a big improvement. In the past, if your smart phone lost battery power then everything stored on the device was gone. If you synchronized all your data to your desktop, this was not too big a problem; but it was inconvenient. I took a trip to London with my Treo 300 and the phone ran down its batteries on the trip. After I charged it back up, all my data including the address book was gone. I had to wait until I returned to Houston to restore everything from my desktop PC. With the Treo 650 this will never be a problem again!

The other big improvement for memory on the Treo 650 is support for SD/MMC expansion cards. These are the same little memory cards that you use in your digital camera. This allows you to store a huge amount of information on your smart phone. For example, you can add a 512-megabyte memory card to the Treo 650 for about $100.00. With a memory card, the Treo 650 makes a good snapshot digital camera and a portage music player.

Bluetooth Headset

Since the Treo 650 supports the Bluetooth wireless technology, you can add a wireless headset to the phone. I have taken a survey of Bluetooth users among my business associates. Everyone has recommended Bluetooth as a winner and well worth the cost of the handsets that range from $60 to $150.

Next week I will discuss the application of the new cell phone technologies to your business.