I’ve had quite a bit of problems with my Palm Treo 650.
Some of the third party software seemed to have caused some major problems with the phone. I know for sure that some problems were caused by a third party application required to make the stylus work for the Treo (Treo’s seem to come with Graffiti hand writing recognition disabled). The phone kept having weird problems like freezing, going slowly, and the like, even while making calls.
The other problem seems to have been related to the battery. The battery seemed to have problems with holding a charge, so I figured it must have been old when I bought it, though I thought the seller said it was new. I took the power adapter with me in the car and used an inverter with that to power the phone so I could make calls while out. After doing that, my phone would go into a crazy epileptic mode where it would flash on and off the startup screen rapidly. Every once in a while I could get it to start up by plugging it in for a while, then unplugging it. It would start up and last for a little while, but eventually go back to epileptic mode. Eventually this became quite permanent.
After finally figuring out how, I did a full reset of the device, getting rid of the applications and what not. This did not help. I got a new battery, figuring the old one was shot and for some reason it needed a good battery to work at all. This worked slightly at first, but it started going back to epileptic mode again. So I figured, as a last try, that it might be a problem with the charger, that perhaps my inverter or something else ruined the charger. I bought a dock thing with a seperate battery charger. After much waiting with no phone through all these problems, the charger worked and the phone works just fine again, like it had when I first got it. The separate charger bay wasn’t necessary, as just the dock charging through the phone works, but it is nice with my additional purchased battery to have a backup in case I forget to charge up. Another $40 about for the two items, but I have a working phone again.
I’m very happy, as the cell phone is quite useful, especially since I have no long distance for my home phone; I was unable to make some calls for a while. It has been very useful for contacting cousin Paul and uncle Al while out of the house. It was also quite useful in contacting a friend Corinne about a mock news program my droogie Dwight is making for a video portfolio, as we needed to meet her at Kent State’s news room and needed a way to contact her to make sure she was able to make it (she was running late).