Treo Pro on Election Day: Notes from the Field
For those who may not know, my day job is with the local Sheriff’s Office where part of my responsibilities are related to elections. I supervise the distribution and collection of voting materials and supervise any security measures on Election Day. Starting at 5:00 a.m. with a fully charged battery, I took advantage of the long work day to see how well the Treo Pro performed. I was curious to see how well the battery lasted, how stable the Treo Pro was under heavy use, and how useful it could be in an active setting. By the time you read this, most of the Election outcomes will be known to all. My work day ended at 1:00 a.m. the next day and to see how the Pro measured up at the polls, read on after the break.
Jefferson County, Alabama has 185 voting precincts throughout the 1,119 square miles the County encompasses. There are in the neighborhood of 410,000 voters in the County and turn out was a respectable 78%. As with most of the Nation, we experienced long lines at the polls which translated to an increase in calls for service. Needless to say my Election Day was anything but stationary and that is where the Treo Pro comes into play.
Battery Life
I started the day with a fully charged battery (reading 99% on the SPB Mobile Shell). During the course of the day, 64 minutes of call time was generated, 72 emails were received/responded to, two Yahoo Messenger conversations were held, GoogleMaps was used several times to find addresses and verify location, and during a rare quiet moment during the day I surfed the internet.
At approximately, 1:00 p.m. that afternoon the battery level was down to 64% and after an hour on the sync/charge cable the battery level rose to 80%. I would end the day (or should I say morning) with the battery level at 30%. Here are some observations concerning battery life.
Messenger applications consume a good bit of battery life. I would guess that the Yahoo conversation (held on IM+) consumed almost ten percent of the battery life.
Calls and emailing didn’t seem to drain the battery at alarming rates. It shouldn’t be of any surprise but I found that battery life was easier to manage when applications were completely shut down. I made a conscious effort when I exited an application to go into the Task Manager and end everything that was running.
All in all, I was impressed with the battery life the Treo Pro delivered for the day. If my math is correct, I was consuming about 4% battery life per hour with what I consider heavy use. If this percentage held constant, the Pro’s battery should last in the neighborhood of 25 hours.
Stability/Performance
The last touch screen device I used with regularity was the Treo 750 with WM 6.0. I was glad the Palm placed the reset button under the memory card door to make it convenient for all the resets that occurred. The Treo Pro’s reset button isn’t as convenient, hidden behind the battery cover, and makes resetting the Pro a little more challenging. Fortunately, and maybe to no surprise, I didn’t have a single need for a reset during the day.
Windows Live Search was a convenient way to find addresses. The voice command worked well in audibly entering an address into the search field. I still am having problems using the GPS effectively with Windows Live Search and found myself switching to GoogleMaps when I needed to use the GPS.
Phone performance was really good and the only dropped calls were related to signal strength and not device performance. I used the Treo Pro free handed and with the Jabra SP700 Bluetooth Car Kit. I hope Palm fixes the call history disappearing. It was a little frustrating when a call was missed and you can’t pull up the history. Granted you can push the green button and see the missed call in the “call/contacts” screen.
Closing thoughts
I’ve been using the Treo Pro for about six weeks now and with this marathon work day, I became more familiar and comfortable with the phone. There are still some quirks for Palm to iron out (GPS, call history screen, etc) but I never felt weighted down by the phone, the battery life was really good, and the Treo Pro’s performance was very stable.
I’m still very curious about the AT&T Fuze and the Sony Xperia X1 but for the time being, the Pro is my communications hub.
