Internet browsing capability of treo phones?

Can anyone who actually has and uses a PDA phone like a Treo 270
comment on the internet browser capability of those units?

I am looking for a way to look up things on ebay while in the field. I
tried some of the windows PDA phones on ATT and Tmobile (GSM). They
were very slow. I tried some of the PDA phones in the Sprint store
(few were working). And they are slow as well.

I didn't expect speed, but I understand there is a browser that helps
called Blazer. Naturally that is not gonna be installed on the demo
units in the store.

So can anyone comment on this? Am I kidding myself to think any such
thing is possible?

Thanks!

---

› See More: Internet browsing capability of treo phones?

In article <[email protected]>,
"[email protected]" <[email protected]> wrote:

> Can anyone who actually has and uses a PDA phone like a Treo 270
> comment on the internet browser capability of those units?
>
> I am looking for a way to look up things on ebay while in the field. I
> tried some of the windows PDA phones on ATT and Tmobile (GSM). They
> were very slow. I tried some of the PDA phones in the Sprint store
> (few were working). And they are slow as well.
>
> I didn't expect speed, but I understand there is a browser that helps
> called Blazer. Naturally that is not gonna be installed on the demo
> units in the store.

Don;t be mislead by the nake of the Browser. Until you're using true 3g,
like Verizon has in Washington DC, best you can hope for is dial-up
speed, and more often its effectively 9600 baud.

SprintPCS would be using the Treo 300 or 600, the CDMA models.

On Thu, 19 Feb 2004 02:50:58 GMT, "Robert M." <[email protected]>
wrote:
>> I didn't expect speed, but I understand there is a browser that helps
>> called Blazer. Naturally that is not gonna be installed on the demo
>> units in the store.
>
>Don;t be mislead by the nake of the Browser. Until you're using true 3g,
>like Verizon has in Washington DC, best you can hope for is dial-up
>speed, and more often its effectively 9600 baud.
Like I said, I didn't expect it to be fast. But what I saw was
unusable. I want to be able to search ebay. Not browse, but use the
item search, even the completed items only search.

And I couldn't do it with the ones I tried. But I didn't really try
the Palm OS versions at all. Only the windows phones.

I don't need the pictures, so it's fine if the images are turned off.

So if someone actually has a Palm OS PDA phone on Sprint, can you
search for completeds or not?

Robert M. wrote:

> In article <[email protected]>,
> "[email protected]" <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Can anyone who actually has and uses a PDA phone like a Treo 270
>> comment on the internet browser capability of those units?
>>
>> I am looking for a way to look up things on ebay while in the field. I
>> tried some of the windows PDA phones on ATT and Tmobile (GSM). They
>> were very slow. I tried some of the PDA phones in the Sprint store
>> (few were working). And they are slow as well.
>>
>> I didn't expect speed, but I understand there is a browser that helps
>> called Blazer. Naturally that is not gonna be installed on the demo
>> units in the store.
>
> Don;t be mislead by the nake of the Browser. Until you're using true 3g,
> like Verizon has in Washington DC, best you can hope for is dial-up
> speed, and more often its effectively 9600 baud.

I find it's more like dial-up speed, around 30-60kbps. I use a Treo
600, and I'm *very* happy with the browser performance. Handspring did
a great job with the Blazer browser. The version that runs on the Treo
600 does NOT use a proxy server, unlike the version that runs on the
QCP-6035. The higher bandwidth of these Vision phones, and the higher
performance of the processor in the Treo, allows the browser to deal
with the data directly. (No, it still doesn't do javascript or java!
It does do frames, though.)

It ain't like my broadband service at home, but this is a pocket device
-- I don't need broadband service for the tasks I assign to the phone.
And it's all-you-can-eat for $15 a month. Lots of popular dialup ISPs
charge more than that...

The phone ain't perfect -- I've got several minor gripes with the Treo
600 design. Still, overall, I'm quite happy with it.

[email protected] wrote:

> On Thu, 19 Feb 2004 02:50:58 GMT, "Robert M." <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>>> I didn't expect speed, but I understand there is a browser that helps
>>> called Blazer. Naturally that is not gonna be installed on the demo
>>> units in the store.
>>
>>Don;t be mislead by the nake of the Browser. Until you're using true 3g,
>>like Verizon has in Washington DC, best you can hope for is dial-up
>>speed, and more often its effectively 9600 baud.
> Like I said, I didn't expect it to be fast. But what I saw was
> unusable. I want to be able to search ebay. Not browse, but use the
> item search, even the completed items only search.
>
> And I couldn't do it with the ones I tried. But I didn't really try
> the Palm OS versions at all. Only the windows phones.
>
> I don't need the pictures, so it's fine if the images are turned off.
>
> So if someone actually has a Palm OS PDA phone on Sprint, can you
> search for completeds or not?

It's doable. It can take a couple of minutes to load up the home ebay
page. The browser is smart enough to know when it can't display all the
images on a page (as happens with the main page, and with a typical
search for an item, e.g., "treo 600"). When that happens, it stops
trying to load the images, and you can still scroll around in what
you've got, which is typically the page sans images.

Clicking through a search to a listing takes less than a minute, with
images turned off. And the nice thing is that you can scroll around
before everything has been downloaded.

I have a Treo 600 and I'm happy with the web browsing speed... it's
comparable to 56k dial-up. But a big factor to consider is the small
screen. If I have heady duty browsing to do (as in reviewing many ebay
items), I wouldn't rely on the phone for that. If that's critical, I would
buy a very portable laptop with a wireless card (not the WiFi network kind,
but the satellite kind that allows you to browse from anywhere). Sprint and
others offer such a PC card for laptops.

"[email protected]" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> Can anyone who actually has and uses a PDA phone like a Treo 270
> comment on the internet browser capability of those units?
>
> I am looking for a way to look up things on ebay while in the field. I
> tried some of the windows PDA phones on ATT and Tmobile (GSM). They
> were very slow. I tried some of the PDA phones in the Sprint store
> (few were working). And they are slow as well.
>
> I didn't expect speed, but I understand there is a browser that helps
> called Blazer. Naturally that is not gonna be installed on the demo
> units in the store.
>
> So can anyone comment on this? Am I kidding myself to think any such
> thing is possible?
>
> Thanks!
>

On Fri, 20 Feb 2004 02:08:07 GMT, "Esteban Nunez"
<[email protected]> wrote:

>I have a Treo 600 and I'm happy with the web browsing speed... it's
>comparable to 56k dial-up.
But how about the web browsing capability? Does it seem to handle
most sites well? Anything that doesn't work?

Does anyone have experience with the Toshiba or Hitachi Pocket PC
based PDA phones on Sprint? Any shortcomings with those, disregarding
speed that is?

[email protected] wrote:

> On Fri, 20 Feb 2004 02:08:07 GMT, "Esteban Nunez"
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>I have a Treo 600 and I'm happy with the web browsing speed... it's
>>comparable to 56k dial-up.
> But how about the web browsing capability? Does it seem to handle
> most sites well? Anything that doesn't work?

Anything that requires java or javascript won't work. No flash.

Some badly-designed pages might rely on huge image maps, and would cause
problems.

In general, it works very nicely. My suggestion is to go to a Sprint
PCS store near you and try it out. They are generally happy to give you
a live one to work with. Figure out which sites are representative of
what you want to use wirelessly, and try 'em out!

In article <[email protected]>,
[email protected] <[email protected]> wrote:
oes anyone have experience with the Toshiba or Hitachi Pocket PC
:based PDA phones on Sprint? Any shortcomings with those, disregarding
:speed that is?

You mean aside from the MS operating system?

On Sat, 21 Feb 2004 05:58:42 GMT, "[email protected]"
<[email protected]> wrote:
>In general, it works very nicely. My suggestion is to go to a Sprint
>PCS store near you and try it out. They are generally happy to give you
>a live one to work with. Figure out which sites are representative of
>what you want to use wirelessly, and try 'em out!

I did, they were broken. Several, not working at all. So I got
nowhere with that.

At the ATT store they did have the Pocket PC GSM phone, they put a sim
in it and id DID work, but very slow.

At the Tmobile store they didn't have anything working, same story at
Verizon and at Cingular. Nothing I could try out.

So I am trying to figure if this is all smoke and mirrors or not. So
far it seems that way. Some people say the Motorola Sidekick (GSM)
works ok. But I have Sprint now, if I could find a used PDA phone and
use it I would not have to deal with a contract at least. I could
test for a while without commitment. .

I figured if anyone were successfully using this for simple web
browsing I would be able to find them in the newsgroup. Usenet seems
to be the cream of the crop in users of anything, I think.

[email protected] wrote:

> On Sat, 21 Feb 2004 05:58:42 GMT, "[email protected]"
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>>In general, it works very nicely. My suggestion is to go to a Sprint
>>PCS store near you and try it out. They are generally happy to give you
>>a live one to work with. Figure out which sites are representative of
>>what you want to use wirelessly, and try 'em out!
>
> I did, they were broken. Several, not working at all. So I got
> nowhere with that.
>
> At the ATT store they did have the Pocket PC GSM phone, they put a sim
> in it and id DID work, but very slow.
>
> At the Tmobile store they didn't have anything working, same story at
> Verizon and at Cingular. Nothing I could try out.
>
> So I am trying to figure if this is all smoke and mirrors or not. So
> far it seems that way. Some people say the Motorola Sidekick (GSM)
> works ok. But I have Sprint now, if I could find a used PDA phone and
> use it I would not have to deal with a contract at least. I could
> test for a while without commitment. .
>
> I figured if anyone were successfully using this for simple web
> browsing I would be able to find them in the newsgroup. Usenet seems
> to be the cream of the crop in users of anything, I think.

You need to find a better Sprint store. This device works very nicely
on Sprint PCS. Over the weekend, I was travelling sans laptop. I was
therefore unable to get my daily newspaper by synchronizing to the
machine that builds it for me. It's a 4.5 meg file, that usually synchs
in under 30 seconds. I set my builder to upload it to an ftp site, and
then downloaded it via Blazer on the Treo. It took around 6 minutes.
Not bad. I could have it do that every day, if I wanted, since Vision
is all-you-can-eat for $15/month. There are even solutions to have the
device wake itself up and do that for you (Botzam Recorder, for instance).

And I did all my email and web browsing (lots of googling, of course)
using the Treo. Worked nicely (except that I truly despise this idiotic
thumbboard thingie -- hunt-and-peck is just rippingly tedious compared
to Graffiti!)

The only problem was with one site that (because of poor web design
principles) relies on javascript.

On Thu, 19 Feb 2004 02:50:58 GMT, "Robert M." <[email protected]> wrote:

>Don't be misled by the make of the browser. Until you're using true 3g,
>like Verizon has in Washington DC, best you can hope for is dial-up
>speed, and more often its effectively 9600 baud.

Not realy. GPRS stateside is typically 4 channels down, 2 channels up, so
it's more like 38kbps download. True, that's like dialup, but better than
the 'effective 9600 bps' you cite. (and, baud NEQ bps, BTW).

The 1xRTT systems on CDMA2000 (SprintPCS, Verizon, both nationwide,
including the network used by the Treo 600) deliver data at 50-70 kbps,
typically.

>SprintPCS would be using the Treo 300 or 600, the CDMA models.



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