I have a love-hate relationship with my Handspring Treo 270
. I am on my fifth unit, having suffered failures of the radio, backlight (twice) and battery. But I keep coming back for more because I love carrying around just one device, and its excellent integration of the data and phone functions. Plus, Handspring has at least been cheerful (and paid shipping both ways) when swapping a new unit for my then-defective one.
When Cingular and Handspring finally released the GPRS firmware upgrade, I approached it with some concern.
The instructions are pretty good, although they underestimate the time required for the one-time upgrade. You should allow at least an hour, and for most of the time you can do other things while the Treo is doing its work in the background. The process involves backing up all your data, a firmware upgrade, a hard reset (they do it automatically) and reinstalling everything from scratch (again, they do it).
Be sure that you have Wireless Internet Express enabled at your Cingular account before doing the upgrade. That took a phone call to 800-331-0500, and you have to decide which rate plan you want to be on.
Amazingly, the upgrade went off without a hitch and GPRS worked on the first try. It is noticeably faster downloading data, plus there is no delay to establish communications due to the always on feature. You can always use the Prefs function on your Treo to downgrade to the previous (slow) method of connecting to the Internet via CSM; and even switch back and forth.
