Treo; Mobile Edition; Audible

We upgraded my cellphone the other day. I am now the proud owner of a Treo 755p. I love it. The last “Palm” I had was a Zire … a plastic white and blue device … which didn’t last too long. I got it as an Audible bundle deal, cheap for subscribing to an Audible plan. The device wasn’t entirely cheap on it’s own, over $100 … so getting it for around $30 was a deal. I had a Palm Vx and liked it, had it for years, but never “got into it” thoroughly enough to use it productively. The “Zire” was a tool to use with Audible, to listen to books, but also to get me into productivity through a color screen Palm. (I definitely do better with a color screen as motivation.) The Zire model I had only had a 6-month warranty. After just a little over 6-months of ownership, the screen suddenly had an orange blob on it that looked “cracked” but the screen wasn’t cracked. The blog grew, and ended up covering the whole screen basically, from top to bottom, rendering the device useless. It was a blind Palm. Only “Audible” was useful on it, only if I could find “just the right spot” to touch and open the application, then I could listen to whatever book I could blindly find … suffice it to say, the beauty of this eventually was totally lost when I had no control over the application at all, if it could even be found and opened in the first place. I had no visual reference to anything, so pausing was impossible and well … the whole thing was just a sour grape.

I took the thing apart then, since I had to check and see if it was something inside that could be fixed. There were descriptions of possible problem/fix solutions online here and there, but it ended up that nothing helped. I eventually disconnected the speaker wires, not on purpose, by accident, but that was ok, since it allowed me to distance myself from the device, I put it in a box and out of my attention span. Some months later I came across it a few times and finally ended up chucking it into the garbage.

So I had no Audible device, except my computer, and that isn’t why I got Audible, I got it for super-mobility. My Palm Vx was still active and working fine, it just has a grey-scale screen and just it’s own self ability for simple normal Palm apps. I eventually got a little SanDisk m230 player for Audible use. I never was able to “get into” my Palm Vx since the Zire incident, the “color screen” deal made the Palm Vx so undesireable to me, though it’s a great little device, I admire it still, as always, but find it non-productive for me in normal life.

Our cell phones were little Sanyo 8300’s and finally we came to the “upgrade point” for the highest amount in our contract recently. Hubby and I agreed that we’d get Blackberry’s … then as the time grew closer to actually being able to something, Palm came out with a new “smartphone” the Centro, and I thought that would be nice to have, since it was easier to get into, much cheaper than a Blackberry, by far.

The more we looked at it online, the more we looked for it in stores, and finally saw an actual device and said, nah. Too small. Too limited.

So we looked at the Blackberry’s again, and Hubby wanted one of them, and then I looked at the Treo’s and that became something do-able … so finally the day came and I was able to get one. I love it. It’s so cool. Unlimited data service. Which means it’s a wireless internet device, with a phone, and a Palm platform. It’s an audible.com device too. Even better, since it’s Audible on a wireless device, AudibleAir works. I love that even more. AudibleAir allows me to connect my device to my Audible Library online, and download books in the right Audible format for my device, in whatever segment length I want, on the fly. Subscriptions can be auto-matically downloaded. That works great. The thing I’m thrilled at then is the ability to bookmark and such again. A visual reference available to what I’m listening to.

Another thing about the phone is the Sprint service we have, Sprint TV has interesting content streamable, and premium features, that are given to new contracts for a couple of months free, are even better. Now these things were available on our little Sanyo phones, but did work like they do on this Treo. Also, we didn’t even thoroughly understand that both our phones had unlimited data just because of the Pictures package we had, didn’t start out with, but got later, and we didn’t use it much, just some. If only we’d looked into it and understood, but then we wouldn’t have liked the stuff much either, with the teeny little screen those flip phones have, and the different “experience” through a “phone” — compared to what it’s like on the Treo, which is closer to a “computer” experience than a “phone” experience.

Now then, this blog, as well as my either ones, have the wp-mobile plugin installed and activated. If one is trying to comment and runs into a problem, hopefully you’ll see you can view the “full website page” which would use the full CSS, the wp-mobile plugin being just a simple CSS served as the webpage.

My Treo does bring this site in as a “mobile” page. I have a Playstation Portable, and it doesn’t register as a mobile device when I go to my blogs with it (it can connect to a wireless network, isn’t a mobile wireless device on it’s own.) It is said (on the web elsewhere here and there) to have a “full browser” … it’s browser does have three settings for Display … the “normal” one displays ugly mixed up-esh-ness for my blogs, the “Just …” whatever it is setting is OK, but the “Smart-Fit” setting is the best. It re-orders the sections to make it fully readable, nicely.

Of course the wp-mobile plugin is nice for “mobile” browsers since it shows a reduced site automatically to devices registering as a mobile device to the plugin’s list. Since beginning to write this post I have gotten my “comments” sections to play nice with wp-mobile … basically I had to add stuff to that theme’s comments page, “just like” I have to do to my regular theme comment pages.

If anyone has problems with the “wp-mobile edition” of this blog, just click the text link “Exit the Mobile Edition (view the standard browser version) beneath each post.

When on a mobile device and you have exited the Mobile Edition, you can re-gain access to the Mobile Edition by finding the text link “Return to the Mobile Edition” beneath each post.