Upgraditis

I did something very odd and maybe even foolish a couple of weeks ago, shortly after Steve Jobs unveiled the new iPhone at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco: I went out and sold my Treo 650, and got – well, not the iPhone, which won’t even be available in the US until June, and in Asia until 2008 (count the number of nights we’ll have to sleep, boys and girls). I got myself a Sony Ericsson M600i – about which more, later.

Call it "upgraditis" – the mind-numbing, toe-curling urge to get something newer and snazzier than what you already have, even if what you already have seems to be working perfectly and has served you as faithfully as a St. Bernard in the wintry Alps. It’s a painful and recurrent condition, something you can’t be vaccinated against for life like the measles or chicken pox. But like these diseases, it takes hold of your body and soul for a few feverish days, driving you to reconnoiter dark corners of the Internet for tech specs, street prices, and notices of availability. It’s on your mind when you fall asleep, and it’s on your mind when you wake up, this spectral vision of a digital device so irresistibly slick and feature-laden that it practically vibrates with the promise to improve your life, your earnings, and the way you appeal to the opposite sex.

Now, having said that, let me add quickly that that wasn’t exactly how I felt about the M600i – but only because the iPhone prototype was already out there somewhere in Cupertino, California, on display under lock and key, and under development in the lab. The day the iPhone gets here sometime next year, I’m going to cancel classes and dash off at dawn to the nearest Apple Center for my pre-reserved unit, which will probably require me to apply for a fresh salary loan.

But this isn’t about the iPhone.

Let’s start with my trusty Treo, with which, as I’ve already said, there was basically nothing wrong. Well, nothing aside from the fact that, from a certain angle of view, it could be described as butt-ugly (the fellow who observed in a techie forum that the organically-molded Treo resembled a salagubang wasn’t too far off the mark). But like a devoted pug, the Treo’s looks grow on you, and I’d have to admit that I have yet to hold a phone as, well, hand-holdable as this one. Its contours fit your palm perfectly, and nearly every stubby key is within reach of your thumb for easy one-handed (and one-fingered!) operation.

I’d used Treos – including the earlier 600 model – for well over two years, an eternity in digital-gadget time. For those of you who’ve never seen or used one, it’s a smartphone (phone + PDA + music player + media viewer + camera + Internet browser) produced by Palm. It’s a little computer, really (or "convergence device," in techie talk). It wasn’t the only smartphone in town, but it was arguably the best. The Palm Operating System on which it runs is pretty long in the tooth by now and has been due for a major makeover, but old age has its benefits: tons of great apps have been written for the Palm, and the system itself is rock-stable. If all you want is something that does what it’s supposed to do, you can’t go wrong with a Treo, which itself has been upgraded to the Treo 680 here and the Treo 700 in the US (as well as to a Windows version, which I know nothing about and can’t say anything for). With the notable exception of wi-fi, the Treo had everything: quad-band networking, Bluetooth, GPRS, camera, expandability via an SD card slot, etc.

So why did I give my Treo up? Back to upgraditis, which afflicts me every 18 months for laptops and every 12 months for cell phones, on the average. When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone and promptly put it back on the display shelf, not to be opened for a year, I felt cheated out of a new toy, and so began shopping around for a substitute – something, anything to amuse me for the next 12 months while Moses crosses the Red Sea into Canaan with the iPhone in hand.

That hapless task of playing iPhone substitute fell to the Sony Ericsson M600i, another smartphone with an impeccable pedigree; I’d used three SEs before, most notably the K750 which I thought was built exceedingly well, a slim business phone whose wraparound matte silver band complemented and reinforced the charcoal black body handsomely. The M600i employs the same cosmetic scheme – it’s like a bigger, broader K750, in a way – but it has lots more goodies beneath the skin. Or does it? Like the Treo and the K750, the M600i inexplicably lacks wi-fi; unlike its SE sibling, it doesn’t have a camera, not even a built-in radio. It’s a 3G phone, which means you can theoretically watch TV on it and download music from online services, but do those extras really matter to the text-crazy Pinoy?

An even bigger adjustment was the realization that the Symbian 9.1/UIQ3 OS (never mind what the alphabet soup says; just read "not Palm, not Windows") used by the M600i–and, with a few differences, other smartphones like the SE P990i and the Nokia E61 – still doesn’t have half as many apps written for it as there are available for the Treo. Among the software essentials I immediately missed was a full backup program like BackupMan, a simple checkbook program, and, for the globally footloose digerati, a subway guide planner like Metro. I also missed uniquely Treo touches like the "chat" feature of SMS, which allows you to keep and view your texts as a running dialogue, and the "QuickText" feature that lets you create and use template replies like "My address is 81-F Masikap Street, Bgy. Central, QC, etc."

So what there’s to like in the M600i? For one thing, it’s cheaper than the Treo by almost half – about P15,000 on the open market. (But hey, we’re here to spend and not save money, right?) It’s also much slimmer and lighter than the Treo, at only 112 grams vs. the Treo’s 178 and the P990i’s 155. The touch-screen is large and bright, the icons sharp and smartly designed. (One little complaint I’ve always had against the Palm was how rough and elementary-schoolish its icons were.) That’s just eye candy, but if you have to look at something all day, you’ll appreciate the difference. The keyboard with its unique two-sided "rockers" takes a bit of getting used to, but if you’re used to a Treo’s nubbins, this won’t be a problem. The keys are illuminated gloriously, and there’s a scroll wheel and enough buttons on the side to let you navigate the screen without missing the old Treo’s 5-way dial pad too much.

The M600i can take up to 2 gigs of flash memory on its tiny M2 ("Memory Stick Micro" – aargh, yet another form factor) card. I put a one-gig stick in mine, uploaded about 150 songs to it, and still had almost 400 MB left over. As a Sony product, the sound quality of the M600i is excellent as to be expected, but the proprietary jack prevents me from using the standard 3.5mm Shure e3c’s I favor my iPod with.

Are you still with me? Let me keep this simple for you: the M600i is a great, sleek smartphone with a lot to recommend it on its own, but it’s no Treo-killer, let alone an iPhone-killer. I’m sure I’ll learn to love it over this long year as I discover its hidden charms, but for the time being, let’s just say that I have a suspicion that my upgraditis resulted in a rare complication called downgraditis. And to smoothen the transition, I’ve moved the old Treo ring tones over to the M600i.

Now, where’s that iPhone?

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at http://www.penmanila.net.