Nokia 9500 versus Palmone Treo

slacker76 wrote:Hi, everyone, here is my situation: I currently own a Palmone Treo 600, which I absolutely love. I've owned several smartphones before, and this is the only one that has been worth its salt. I was all set to upgrade to the Treo 650 as soon as the GSM Model came out, but then I saw a brief article about the Nokia 9500. On paper, this appears to be the ultimate mobile device. However, before I go out and spend all that money, I wanted to know from people who have actually used the 9500 if it is that much better than the Treo. Thanks!

With 9500 you'll have three major advantages:
- Outstanding 640x200 16bits screen. Very confortable to see web pages and to work with Excel/Word;
- Good QWERTY keyboard that you actually can write with two fingers at the same time;
- Wi-Fi (and it works fine).

Okay, 9500 it's bigger but you'll get a more functional phone with real keys. And it's slower than Treo 650 but on the other side you have 32Mb RAM insted of 23Mb, and more 80Mb inside.

Did I convince you? Hope so, because I have 9500 for almost a month and it's a great device!

PS: The MP3 player as a great stereo sound! And with a 1Gb MMC card imagine all the music you can have...

Yeah, I will probably get one of these, it was just that I noticed that it has as Texas Instruments OMAP processor. I had an HP ipaq 6315 with the exact same processor and the performance was absolutely horrible, so I was a little bit concerned when I learned that this Nokia has it, too. But I'm willing to bet that that the performance issues were more likely stemming from the Windows Mobile OS than the processor itself...

Stay with Treo or upgrade to Treo 650. N9500 is junk and I will trade mine when Treo 650 GSM version is out. The software is rubbish. You will miss the intuitive of Palm OS. I was a Palm user and plan to go back... really miss my Agendus Pro and other stuff.

It depends if you want / need a really good keyboard. This is the reason why I will get a 9500 in January. The thumbboard is not too easy to write on. And of course WiFi is a good argument.
On the other side I will probably miss the MS Office connectivity with DocumentsToGo, nothing really beats this application.

sindu, could u pls compare treo speakerphone with that of 9500 and or 9210.

curious wrote:sindu, could u pls compare treo speakerphone with that of 9500 and or 9210.

I don't own Treo 600 nor Nokia 9210i. I own Sony UX-50 which is a Palm OS with wifi and Bluetooth. I must admit the keyboard of 9500 is the positive but its speakerphone is at par with other mobilephone such as SonyEricsson K700.

sindu wrote:Stay with Treo or upgrade to Treo 650. N9500 is junk and I will trade mine when Treo 650 GSM version is out. The software is rubbish. You will miss the intuitive of Palm OS. I was a Palm user and plan to go back... really miss my Agendus Pro and other stuff.

To each their own. I find the Treo 650 to be an interesting unit as well, but its poor memory, no multitasking OS and the fact that you cannot put it down on a table to work with makes the commie a much better alternative, IMO.

I'm pretty sick of reading complaints regarding the slowish application launching. Admittedly Nokia really should have spent more time optimising the UI design, putting in some kind of timeglass during launch time. And I'm sure they could've speed it up somewhat. But the thing is that the memory structure used in Symbian OS devices is just rather slow. Flash memory is simply slower than SDRAM used in PPCs etc., HOWEVER; on the plus side it is completely secure - there are no risks of losing data when there's no power (unlike PPCs). And there's also no registry sh!t getting filled up, slowing the system down, forcing you to reboot twice a day.

I don't have much experience with Palm OS, but no multitasking and, IMO, an amateurish looking UI with no decent file handling doesn't make it a viable alternative, to me.

And there's always solutions to every problem. Why is it that everyone is so quick to complain about the pettiest things, not bothering to spend even a few minutes looking for solutions? Ok, so the application launching is a little slow. Lets look for the simplest solution... -Keep your most used applications resident in RAM! After all the 9500 has a whopping 64MB of RAM. So you keep your most used apps open and they will launch instantly. Problem solved. Now was that so hard?

raven, each consumer who has pay a high price and has high expectation has every right to complain on the obvious slowness of 9500. it is one of the main purposes of this forum for users to give input and air their views/opinions, just the same as your own view just posted. besides, the slowness is a serious problem at least
according to MANY participants of this forum and other related fora. further, the slowness cannot be used as an excuse to claim stability. linux os such as in the motorola a780 is even more robust and stable. my moto a780 has NEVER required reboost for the 4 weeks used. the point is both opening applications and browsing web by opera 7 on linux on a780 are very fast, i.e. no one can and no one ever say that it is slow. my 9210 crashed in the first week several times. only until fm 4.xx that it became more stable but worked slower than before. my 9210i rarely required reboost though. 9210 is slow, a few mentioned about this. but no one seriously complained about it. 9210i has better speed than 9210 and most are satisfied. but unlike the newly launched 9500, both are 4 and 2 years old devices respecedly.

imho, window mobile os NOW can hardly be faulted on the stability.
since my ipag 3970 with gsm/gprs air card and /or pct data card is rarely crash. my xda2 require few soft reset one or two times PER MONTH. i therefore wonder what device ppc u used that requires twice reboot per day. it is very likely a more than 5 years old and very low-end ppc i quess.

i am just worry that the tone of certain people in this forum inclines to the way of my--device-is-the-best/my-judgment-cannot-be-argued. after all this site, unlike one similar site, has never overwhelmingly praised 9500 as an all round great and excellent device. so you may have different view or luckily get a special 9500 or very clever to solve the problem but there is no need to subjectively defend the obvious defects of 9500 discovered and submit by real users. objective view(as the reviews of this site), able to accept his own oversight (as one commy site try laughingly to avoid), open and tolerent to other opinions and input are the great virtues of web based community fora. i hope that aas should stay its respectful course.

slacker76 wrote:Hi, everyone, here is my situation: I currently own a Palmone Treo 600, which I absolutely love. I've owned several smartphones before, and this is the only one that has been worth its salt. I was all set to upgrade to the Treo 650 as soon as the GSM Model came out, but then I saw a brief article about the Nokia 9500. On paper, this appears to be the ultimate mobile device. However, before I go out and spend all that money, I wanted to know from people who have actually used the 9500 if it is that much better than the Treo. Thanks!

I do own both Nokia 9290 (US version) and Treo 600. On any day I prefer to useNokia. I belive when Nokia 9500 or even better Nokia 9300 will be available in US (with GSM 850) I will dump the Treo the same day.

curious wrote:raven, each consumer who has pay a high price and has high expectation has every right to complain on the obvious slowness of 9500. it is one of the main purposes of this forum for users to give input and air their views/opinions, just the same as your own view just posted. besides, the slowness is a serious problem at least
according to MANY participants of this forum and other related fora. further, the slowness cannot be used as an excuse to claim stability. linux os such as in the motorola a780 is even more robust and stable. my moto a780 has NEVER required reboost for the 4 weeks used. the point is both opening applications and browsing web by opera 7 on linux on a780 are very fast, i.e. no one can and no one ever say that it is slow. my 9210 crashed in the first week several times. only until fm 4.xx that it became more stable but worked slower than before. my 9210i rarely required reboost though. 9210 is slow, a few mentioned about this. but no one seriously complained about it. 9210i has better speed than 9210 and most are satisfied. but unlike the newly launched 9500, both are 4 and 2 years old devices respecedly.

imho, window mobile os NOW can hardly be faulted on the stability.
since my ipag 3970 with gsm/gprs air card and /or pct data card is rarely crash. my xda2 require few soft reset one or two times PER MONTH. i therefore wonder what device ppc u used that requires twice reboot per day. it is very likely a more than 5 years old and very low-end ppc i quess.

i am just worry that the tone of certain people in this forum inclines to the way of my--device-is-the-best/my-judgment-cannot-be-argued. after all this site, unlike one similar site, has never overwhelmingly praised 9500 as an all round great and excellent device. so you may have different view or luckily get a special 9500 or very clever to solve the problem but there is no need to subjectively defend the obvious defects of 9500 discovered and submit by real users. objective view(as the reviews of this site), able to accept his own oversight (as one commy site try laughingly to avoid), open and tolerent to other opinions and input are the great virtues of web based community fora. i hope that aas should stay its respectful course.

i agree with some things u say
we have the right to compalin..blah blha blah

but what u had was a ppc without built in gsm
have u ever tried pda2k or qtek or whatever there names are

they all functioned the way the are supposed do but in one day u had to reboot atleast once

if that doesnt annoy lets not forget the battery life on 9500 is far more superoir than any other ppc phone edition

on a full charge i get 2-3 days with heavy use of atleast one hour of wifi plus gprs
also talkin 1-2 hours daily and lets not forget i spent atleast 1 hour just opening it and playin around wiith it

i agree with u that on paper the pda2k is far more superior than 9500 but not battery wise

also the thing i hated about ppc is that when there is no more battery everything is erased.
i have never seen a phone that does that :frown:

plus i dont see why waiting 1-2 seconds before opening any applications bother u
are u really in that much of an hurry :icon4:

in conclusion i have done my homework with a great deal
the best phone with a usable keypad and wifi is the 9500

lool
raven ur post is 2 long and i dont feel like reading 🙄 🙄 😃

Everyone has different tastes, ideas, needs & wants from a machine. So why argue about each others perceptions?

Me, I need a qwerty keyboard. The 9500 is the only one since the Psion 5mx that I have seriously considered and am now glad that I have got one. I have posted elsewhere some of the niggles / concerns that I have to date (all five days useage!) in the hope that Nokia monitor these forums and can use the feedback to "improve" future firmware or models. It is onlyby benchmarking allmachines that the species will improve!

N242 wrote:I do own both Nokia 9290 (US version) and Treo 600. On any day I prefer to useNokia. I belive when Nokia 9500 or even better Nokia 9300 will be available in US (with GSM 850) I will dump the Treo the same day.

I feel like I should clarify my point why I like Nokia and I do not like Treo.

What I do not like about Treo:

1. Dialing the phone number is very difficult. On-screen keyboard is probably the worst turn off point for me of all. When I tried to use it on the go, you just cannot feel any keys. Forget to even try to use it when you drive. The keyboard at the bottom is just too small to be useful to dial phone numbers quickly too.

2. Browsing the web looks just ridicules on the vertically oriented low resolution screen after very usable Nokia�s 640 pixels wide screen.

3. Navigating many small menus is almost impossible without a styles. Again how useful it is on the go or in the moving car?

4. Speaker phone � Treo does not even come close to the quality of Nokia speaker phone. Once I had a conference call with 10 people in the room and our regular conference phone broke. I offered to use 9290 and absolutely everybody was surprised by the quality of the speaker phone on the other end.

Why did I use Treo 600 at all?

1. Treo is the only quad-band PIM I know of. I really need GSM 850 band. Here in California GSM 1900 is very unreliable. I travel a lot to Europe and having only GSM 1900 is outdated. Nokia 9500/9300 solves it.

2. The other reason is the AT&T stop providing circuit switched data dial up on their network. So no more Web browsing on Nokia 9290. GPRS or even better EDGE of 9500 solves this too.

So why would I use Treo after I get US version of 9500 or 9300?

I am still not sure how critical it is to be in Europe and to have a phone without 900 band.
Can some one tell me will just having 1800 band work in Europe?

In most cases it will. Here in Holland we have 2 networks that use 900, and 3 networks that use 1800 (yes, that are many networks for such a small country, ain't it 😃)