What is not in the box, which I was expecting, was some sort of case. Even a flip cover would have been a good thing. The Treo is about the same length as my old Zire, but nearly an inch narrower and double the thickness, so my old case doesn't fit.

I wasn't comfortable carrying the Treo in my purse without some sort of case, so I tucked it into a plastic bag and went on the case hunt, eventually choosing a generic leather case from Best Buy that holds the Treo firmly but still allows for easy removal.

The headset is a single-ear one, with a microphone built into the cord. As always, I promptly lost the little fabric cover for the earpiece; I haven't missed it. The headset also didn't come with a case or bag. Like most Treos, the plug for the headset is smaller than the usual headphone plug, which means that my iPod headphones no longer fit my Palm. I purchased an adapter so that I could use headphones with two earpieces.

Install and setup
The setup of the Treo itself was easy. I took out the battery and slipped my phone's SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) card into the Treo, tucked away ingeniously into a small drawer beneath the battery. SIM card installed, I plugged in my new toy and let it charge itself for three hours. Finally, time to HotSync.

And therein I found the first problem: the version of the Palm Desktop on the CD is older than the one I'd had installed, and the Treo wanted it changed. I uninstalled the Desktop and installed the CD version, but was disappointed to realize that it is definitely a step backward.

Most noticeably for me, the Voice Memo feature formerly included in the Desktop is not in the new version. The Treo itself has the Voice Memo software, but I cannot play the recordings back on the Desktop. The Desktop also has a strange bug relating to Undated ToDos. Creating a ToDo but not assigning a date, instead of leaving the ToDo undated, now assigns a date of December 31, 2031. According to the Palm forums, Palm is aware of this but there is no current plan to fix it.

When I rebooted the computer after the installation, I got an error message about a missing file, "NPInstall.dll". The Desktop and HotSync worked, but the error message appeared each time I rebooted. After an extensive Internet search, I found out that it was related to the PalmSource Package Installer, and reinstalling that (from http://www.palmsource.ca/developers/installer/index.html) removed the error.

All of this wouldn't have happened if Palm hadn't decided to roll back to an earlier version of the Desktop. It's not clear to me why they would do this, and what I supposedly gained from it besides a bit of aggravation. If I had it to do over again, I would try using the Treo with my previously installed Desktop first.

The Treo's functionality
So, how does the Treo itself actually work? The most obvious change for me was the lack of Graffiti. For the first few hours, I was constantly reaching for the stylus to write directly on the screen, and actually had it out of its storage slot a few times before I realized I didn't need it. By the time I'd been using the Treo for a day or so, though, I was comfortable with the keyboard.