Non-Profit Tech Blog

I happen to be responsible for 12 Treo 650s and 4 Treo 700Ws all purchased from Verizon Wireless. From a corporate IT point of view, Treo 650s require more maintenance especially when using Verizon’s Workgroup Monitor which is responsible for forwarding MS Exchange data to Verizon’s web cache of your data. I’ve found that the Treo 650 at least as provisioned by Verizon Wireless is a problematic phone at best because the sync software performs poorly. I’ve confirmed that with Verizon Wireless DTS technical support and they also report a lot of frustration with the product. There is a piece of software that Verizon will provide (for $2000) that will allow for more robust enterprise integration but the software basically requires its own server and provisioning on your network DMZ for secure operations. This is a terrible option for nonprofits as it requires building out even more infrastructure just to support mobile e-mail.

The Treo 700W does NOT have a Wireless Sync problem simply because it doesn’t use it. It uses a built-in SSL-capable version of Activesync that allows for the Treo 700W to directly access an Exchange server via the Internet. This is a superior architecture for mobile e-mail access. Setup of synchronization between Exchange and the Treo 700W is quite painless but will require some moderate reconfiguration of your Exchange server. Microsoft has an article on reconfiguring an SSL-enabled Exchange Server for Windows Mobile 2005 ActiveSync clients. Make sure you do that reconfiguration if you also happen to use an SSL-enabled Outlook Web Access or it will keep throwing errors while running ActiveSync.

The Treo 650 requires quite a bit more maintenance if you require that all handheld users be able to download attachments created within Microsoft Office. Documents to Go has to be installed for Microsoft Office compatibility yet Documents to Go has to be reinstalled again should you decide to upgrade the firmware (as provided by Verizon Wireless). The Treo 700W comes with the Windows Mobile 2005 edition of Office and requires no maintenance in that respect.

Both Treo models suffer from unusual glitches related to what seem to be memory leaks and require soft resets once or twice a month on average. The Treo 700Ws come with backup software for the dreaded day that one will have to do a hard reset which eliminates all data on the phone and resets it to its original state. While BOTH models do this, it doesn’t happen often but the likelihood is fairly high that it will happen to ALL Treo users during the ownership of the phone. Because of this, I again recommend the Treo 700W because it has built-in backup software that will allow you to backup all your important data to an SD card. The Treo 650 does not include backup software and indeed you have to teach users how to change save locations so that data is stored on the card and not the built-in memory on the phone.

Users have some complaints about the Treo 700W — the screen is a little “small” due to less resolution on the screen. The phone keypad is not the default option on the Treo 700W. However, all the users of our Treo 700Ws very much appreciate the consistency and reliability of using Activesync for Exchange synchronization. They also love the fact that the Treo 700Ws take advantage of Verizon’s EVDO support and that you can do a Google search straight from the Today screen.

I am planning on migrating the Treo 650 users to the Treo 700W as soon as possible and quite possibly staying on the Windows Mobile 2005 platform as well.