Got my Cingular Wireless bill today and it was a shocker – $179.80. Yikes! I was expecting some roaming charges from our Europe trip, but this…ouch!

It breaks down something like this:

• We have a $39.99 plan + $19.99 for an additional line + $25 for unlimited Internet on my Treo and then there’s all the stupid service charges, taxes, and fees that they always layer on top – right there, that accounts for $95. Damn, that’s a lot right there. Nicole is trying to talk me out of the unlimited Internet on my Treo – which sounds pretty rational, except for the fact that I’m a geek and what’s the fun of a Treo without Internet?
• About $38 of roaming charges from 29 minutes in Italy and Spain at $1.29/minute – the worst was a 7 minute call that cost us $9 (bringing us to a total so far of around $133). We could’ve saved on these roaming charges by purchasing and using an Italian SIM card, but we honestly didn’t expect to use enough minutes for it to make much of a difference.
• $46 of roaming charges for 2,334 KB of data access (my unlimited Internet is free in the U.S. but costs $0.02/KB abroad). There was one particular day where I used a lot of data trying to look up rental cars and credit card companies on the Internet for a friend who had a bit of an emergency(lost a credit card) – in retrospect, we should’ve made the drive into town and found an Internet cafe. There was also a point in the trip where I remember discovering, to my dismay, that XpressMail and/or VersaMail were auto-checking for mail at I-don’t-know-what-interval, which means that they could’ve been pulling lots of data while the phone was sitting in my pocket. Next time I travel, I’m going to make very sure that those auto-checks are all turned off.
• And that brings us to a grand total of around $180. Sigh…

This isn’t like the scanners in the grocery store where you just do a quick swipe… This is snapping a picture of a bar code with the Treo camera at just the right distance with good lighting and without moving too much… so forget opening up your own grocery store. Still, it’s pretty nifty to see somebody make the Treo do something so far away from its intended purpose.

Barcode/13

Maybe you can want to get all the ISBN book numbers of every book on your bookshelf, for insurance purposes? You could use this, although typing the ISBN numbers is probably faster. 🙂

I have an unlocked model from PalmOne so I can’t test this.

Upgrade Locked Cingular GSM Treo 650 to an Unlocked GSM version

So far it seems to be a mixed bag for me.

The install instructions looked easy enough but it was a huge pain in the butt for me. While Hotsyncing, my Treo and my PC kept losing the connection and so everything wasn’t getting transferred over and the installation would no auto-start on my Treo. Then when trying again, it would say “not enough memory” even though I had more than 15 MB, but I could resolve this by deleting the partial firmware files. I am not sure, but I think some of these problems were due to BackupBuddy, Sunrise, Photos, and other conduits getting in the way and causing errors. At least my first good Hotsync was after disabling all those conduits (something that I didn’t see in the Palm docs).

Once installed my phone info says:

Software: Treo650-1.13-ROW
Firmware: 01.28

The difference it made in memory is impressive. Whereas, I had about 4 MB free before, I now have 12.5 MB free! Also, it could be my imagination, but in the one or two test calls that I placed, it seemed that the volume was much better.

But not all is perfect:

• When I transferred back my data, not everything transferred properly. I lost my Metro cities, my VersaMail and XpressMail configurations, McPhling, my phone settings, and I don’t know what else. Irritating because I made a backup before the install with BackupBuddy and I thought that was supposed to take care of everything?
• Resets. I’ve had 4 or 5 resets already since last night. Errgh. One of them is reproducible – I get it while trying to sync any email account in XpressMail (#*377 just reports “Fatal Exception” – oh, thanks :-)). Great. It was nice being able to read work email, but I guess I’m not going to be doing that anymore! Maybe I can fix this by reinstalling XpressMail?

Update 2005-06-20: I got XpressMail working again by deleting it and reinstalling.