700wx or PPC6800. What's your preference?

[billyman]

I posted this on the 700wx board, but it's not getting any responses. So I thought I'd drop it over here.

Right now I have the 700wx but I'm finding myself wanting to transition to the PPC6800. I bought one today and plan to play w/ it over the weekend before I activate it to see if it will be a better mousetrap.

However, I'd like to hear everyones opinion. Maybe some of you have already made the switch and can share some experienced pros & cons.

Some concerns:

* Signal Strength (does anyone notice a weaker signal on the 6800)
* Bluetooth compatability
* Battery life
* The longevity of the sliding keyboard
* Can the 6800 act as a phone-as-modem w/out having a PAM account (like the Treo)?

A few PROS I have already found:

* Integrated WIFI
* MUCH better camera
* ALOT more RAM
* WM6
* Larger screen

I REALLY like my Treo (since many of the great people here have provided hacks to make the WX actually a pleasure to use) and I have heard many of those hacks also work on the 6800.

Anyway, has anyone made the switch and regretted it??

[emunutz]

My company just rolled out a bunch of Treo 700wx and Moguls, so I've been playing with both over the past few weeks. Personally, I love my Mogul, way better than the Treo in my book, because I'm a gadget geek

Battery life isn't as good on the Mogul, but it's not terrible. It's good enough at least for my needs and I use it A LOT, but it's plugged in at my pc for half the day.

I haven't tested bluetooth on the Treo, but it has to be better than the Mogul. I'm starting to get the same complaints from callers about the choppy sound as the people in the BT thread.

As far as signal, I've seen no real difference. When I have them side by side, they are dead even most of the time.

I haven't tried tethering, but it looks like people are having success here.

All of the pros you listed are dead on. It's awesome to be able to flip on my wifi at work, and watch our security cameras over a fast, steady connection.

The one pro for the Treo in my book is the dialpad within the keyboard. Much easier to dial a number while in the car (I didn't say that) with something you can feel, as opposed to dialing with the touchscreen. So other than the somewhat longer battery and the dialpad on the front, I see no reason to stick with the 700wx, IMHO.

[ViPaDawG]

Firstly, If the Treo's Camera is WORSE than the Moguls (which I seriously doubt), then I think Palm should be taken out back, and beaten, cuz I honestly haven't seen a worse camera, I'm pretty sure I can fingerpaint better pictures.

Anyways, as far as dialing, I think it's fine. Just hit the green talk button, and it brings up the touchscreen keyboard, and It takes a bit to get used to, but you can definitely dial a number if u wanted to, without causing too much havoc on the road.

As far as the phone themselves, Palm has definitely solved RAM issues, as they have put in their own optimizations to make the Treo run exceptionally well, and use memory efficiently, the Mogul....not so much.

With that said, I would still highly recommend the Mogul, just because there is SOOO much stuff you can do to it, that you can have a "different" phone every day, so to speak, and it's great. Plus, people don't realize that the Mogul we have right now is basically running "stock", and a few months down the road, when they have EVDO Rev. A, and some cooked ROMs, we will be livin' the good life.

[bubbatex]

I only have one question (disclaimer - I do not have a Mogul nor a 700wx) - how do you know the signal strength is weaker if you have not activated it and actually made calls on it?

[billyman]

Thanks for the replies. I really appreciate the input. The Palm was my first PDA phone so essentially I'm still a noob when it comes to all of this.

Anyone else care to chime in???

[gobmonster]

Originally Posted by klurf8881

i agree except for the camera part. the 700wx camera was a crap 1.3mp and the moguls is a nice 2mp one. neither are perfect of course, its still a phone, but the moguls pictures are still nicer overall and sharper

Meh, the camera on the mogul suffers from over sharpening, and it has a tuff time figuring out exposers (unless the camera really is that bad), to be honest, i keep my sanyo m1 on me and use that for a camera and bluetooth pics and vids to my phone (until i find a goog bt camera....)

What happened to the mogul having auto focus?

Ive only had limited use with the wmtreo, and to be honest, it just didnt "feel" right with out the sliding keyboard and large screen, theres not much else i can say, it was trully limited use

[papped]

The 700wx camera was absolutely rancid.

Even though the Mogul is far from perfect (I don't really expect phones to make great cameras), it is a HUGE step above the 700wx's grainy, colorless photos.

I like practically everything about my Mogul better than my previous 700wx.

[stroths]

The Mogul's camera is a ton better than the 700wx which I can say from experience. Actually, many preferred the older VGA camera on the 650 because it took better pictures than the newer 1.3mp camera on the 700 series.

The 700wx and Mogul both have the exact same amount of physical RAM (64mb). The 700wx makes better use of the RAM than the Mogul. This is likely due to the fact that Palm released the 700w with only 32mb and they had to optimize the hell out of it to make it run with that. The 700wx was, for the most part, a 700w with double the RAM and some other minor changes. Since the optimization was already there, it did very well with 64mb.

The 700wx is probably one of the most stable ppc phones out there because Palm did a lot of work with it. The 6800 is still very new and has a lot of potential.

The 700wx has WM5 and will likely not get an upgrade to WM6 based on Palm's past track record. The Mogul already has WM6 and eventually people are going to figure out how to make custom ROMs which is something a Palm WM phone has never seen.

Both are great phones and have their strengths. If you want something that just works and doesn't need much tweaking then go with the 700wx. If you love to tweak things then the 6800 might be a better fit for you.

[Big D5]

This all comes down to form factor if you like your keyboard out front with a smaller screen get a Treo. If you like the larger screen and larger qwerty than get the HTC. I personally like the HTC devices better. I have had them both check my Sig, of all the 700wx ranks middle mostly because I really hate the screen size. There is a learning curve in using windows mobile, any device, that said Palm seams to put more time in to make there devices more user friendly to the native device, but this also means a locked up device that needs custom apps to be developed for them to work in that device. The Mogul on the other hand is a more basic rendition of windows mobile, some native adaptations but much more development friendly, most apps written will work on the Mogul and don't need device specific changes. The RAM problem with the Mogul, it doesn't look good on paper but is there a problem here really? I have had my Mogul about 6 weeks now, I have not seen any real problems with this, and I am a heavy user. Once I just stop checking the RAM all the time, just used the device and ran a memory cleaner once a day, I no longer have any RAM problems. This with many other issues are part of the learning curve I spoke of above. How you use the device of choice, what apps you install affect the stability of any windows mobile device, so you need to experiment with the apps and find the combination that soot's your use. Good luck choosing your device, but what ever you chose give the device a chance, use proven software, and look for ways to get what you want from the device but don't blame lockups on the device its most likely the way you are using it.

[dcd]

Originally Posted by bubbatex

I only have one question (disclaimer - I do not have a Mogul nor a 700wx) - how do you know the signal strength is weaker if you have not activated it and actually made calls on it?

good question. although the mogul is not activated, it will still pick up a sprint (or roaming) signal and report signal strength. you could try to place a call and connect to the network, but would get a message that your phone is not activated.

most people are probably looking at how many bars they have. i do not know what the OP is checking. the proper method would be to run a field test on each phone (ive setup treos for customers at work, but ive never owned one and never tried to find out how to do a field test - on the mogul its \windows\fieldtrial.exe) and look at the dbm reading for received signal strength. example: my mogul and Q rssi reporting is flaky by the 'bars', but if you run a field test on each phone you see that the mogul is getting 5-10 dbm better signal than the Q at all times.

'activating' a phone is 2 things - program the device (put the MDN and MSID in) and register the ESN with the telco. this has no effect on the devices ability to connect to the cellular network and report signal strength.