PHONOHOLISM

Dick Pountain/15 April 2010 13:57/Idealog 189

Hi, my name is Dick Pountain and I am NOT a phonoholic. I'm telling you this because I've only just avoided becoming one and felt the need to tell someone. I shouldn't be an obvious candidate for phonoholism anyway, because I basically hate the things (but then how many teetotallers have fallen head-first into alcoholism without ever passing social drinker). Actually it might be genetic because my father refused to have one in the house until work forced him to in the late 1950s, and like him I still swear every time it rings ("Who the f**k is that?") I've only ever owned two mobile phones in my life, and one of those was in Italy (it fell out of my pocket as I was rounding a bend on my Moto Guzzi and smashed into a surprisingly large number of pieces).

The sole phone I own is my Palm Treo 680 to which I'm still deeply attached because it serves as my address book, diary, music player, poetry book and notetaking appliance far more than it does as a phone. I don't give out its number to anyone in the UK, using it for only outgoing calls and Westminster parking: in Italy I swap its SIM for a Telecom Italia one and use it more normally. The Treo still does everything I want rather well. My Graffiti is so good now I can happily take notes on it and it sits at my elbow whenever I'm reading a book for review. I timed myself recently at 20-25 handwritten words per minute, compared to 35wpm typing on my laptop. It sounds good as an MP3 player and its SD card slot makes plenty of room. It functions well as a phone and its Contacts app is massively superior to that on more fashionable phones. My problem is quite simple, the mere existence of the iPhone - there's no question that it's one of the most elegant and desirable gadgets ever designed and whenever I play with a friend's one I feel that dreadful stirring in my wallet. Quite apart from its play value, there are several apps I would love to have, including a guitar tuner and chord finder.

The outrageous price of iPhone contracts immunized me to its charm for a year or so, but when a friend discovered you can get it on PAYG from Tesco I felt myself falling and realised that if I didn't do something fast I would be a goner. That meant fixing those things about my Treo that made it feel inadequate. First the atrocious web browser Blazer, so bad that I very rarely went online at all. Opera Mobile isn't available for PalmOS and Opera Mini requires Java, which I didn't have installed. That sparked off a thrilling treasure hunt because Palm stopped supporting IBM's Java machine and no longer offers it for download, but I soon found an old version by Googling. It was a JAR archive, not a Palm PRC and I couldn't find the JAR2PRC utility anywhere. Finally the penny dropped to download it directly from the Treo rather than via my PC, and that worked. I'm far more impressed by Opera Mini than Barry Collins was on his iPhone (www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2010/04/13/opera-mini-for-iphone-review-first-look/), perhaps because Blazer is so much more awful than Safari. I like the way it "greeks" text so you see the outline of a whole page layout before zooming in. A little $5 utility called OperaFrontEnd makes Opera the default browser, and it works flawlessly and remarkably fast given that I don't have 3G. I now browse a lot, and have even posted to my blog via the Treo.

A remaining niggle was that the Treo couldn't fit enough text on a screen when browsing, so I looked for an alternative font manager and found FontSmoother which completely replaces Palm's fonts with proper antialiased, scaled fonts in sizes down to a minuscule 6pt. What's more, it lets you specify a different font and size for each separate Palm app, so now I can view text-heavy web pages in 12pt Tahoma. FontSmoother costs $12.95, so I'd completely transformed my Treo experience for under £9.

The cherry on top was that while scouring Palm app sites I discovered BugMe, a little drawing app that captures either a screen grab or a photo via the Treo's camera and lets me scribble diagrams and captions straight onto it. It's a stunningly useful way to take notes in all kinds of practical situations, from plumbing to paintings. In his column last month Paul Ockenden explained the difference between capacitative and resistive screen phones and he made me realise that I couldn't ever live with an iPhone because I need that pen and it doesn't have one, and never could because its screen isn't accurate enough. As for the Treo not having Wi-Fi or 3G, I can live with that as it means only having to charge it twice a month rather than twice a day. (I could get 3G by swapping it for a Centro but I won't bother). My only remaining worry is Palm going bust so I've just hoarded two spare batteries, and I think I've nipped phonoholism in the bud, for now...