I'm a long time Palm user, and I live in GSM-land, so I bought an unlocked unit in Singapore at the end of November. It was great, and I was happier than a hungry bunny with a new bag of carrots. It installed and worked perfectly, and I think they've done a great job on the integration, and the usuability design. I gave both the P800 and the P900 a try out when they came out and I found them difficult to use, with a hard-to-decipher UI, and slooooooow. Treo is of course the familiar Palm screen, and you can tweak it as you would any regular Palm unit.

Phone usage and reception and SMS etc all great. Touch screen integration to the phone is good. There are some small irritating things (eg can't paste a phone number in from another app then edit part of it before dialling) which I'm sure will get fixed in future firmware upgrades. The camera really really sucks. It is appallingly bad. Given that 2MP camera phones are now out in Japan, there's no excuse for installing something slightly less effective than that smeary plastic magnifying glass you got in your Xmas cracker.

Now, you will have doubtlessly noticed my extensive use of the past tense in the above. That's because, about three weeks after buying it, the sound and touchscreen suddenly stopped working. No physical shock or damage, and the unit was not abused. It seems that this is an uncommon but not unique problem. Anyway, trying to rectify it along with Handspring tech support ended up with the machine in a reset death spiral that turned it into an attractive paperweight.

The tech support in Singapore was the worst, shoddiest, ill-informed and generally responsibility-evading that I have ever come across. Given that this distributor (C20 corp) has the product for the whole of SE Asia I would urge anyone thinking of picking up a cheap unlocked unit there to give it a miss unless they actually live there and can go round to the distributor's warehouse and paint abusive slogans on the door.

I eventually resorted to calling HS in the US and, er, lying when asked "is this a US-bought unit ?". They have now sent me a replacement, which I should have by the weekend. The advance replacement program is pretty good - they send you a new unit first, then you send the old one back in their packaging.

The best discussion board seems to be http://discussion.treocentral.com. Reading there indicates a high ratio of individual lemon units, ie there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the unit's design and build, and there are people using it 24 hours a day for all sorts of stuff with no problems whatsoever. But there are also lots of people on their second, third, and even fourth replacement because they are DOA or go wrong very quickly. This is compounded by the fact that it seems to be very popular and back ordered all over the place, so maybe they are overstretching their manufacturing lines and build quality is suffering in some cases. (Cartoon bubble - Salesman: "Yes sir, and as you can see this unit was built on the Monday midnight shift after a four day holiday weekend" Buyer: "Hmm - can I get an RMA to go with that ?"). Also, look for cheap OEM accessories at Dans Cellular store on ebay.

To answer your original question: should you get one ? Yes, definitely, if you are used to and happy with Palm as a PDA, it's great. It really does integrate well, and allows you to carry one fewer thing in your pocket. If you're not over eager to be an early adopter, I'd give it a couple more months for the supply shortages to ease as I believe that will reduce your chances of getting a DOA unit, and I'd also buy it from a local store with trustworthy warranty service.

Regards

Mark