Setup

The first time you take the Treo 600 out of the box, you will need to charge the built in Lithium Ion battery. It could take approximately three hours to get a full charge. Handspring bundles an AC adapter that connects directly to the bottom port of the Treo. Those of you who want a desktop cradle will need to put down some extra cash - Handspring does not include a desktop cradle to sync and power your Treo 600. They only bundle the AC adapter cable and the USB cable. This is one area where the Motorola MPx200 exceeds in – bundling more accessories with their phone.

If you purchase this phone directly from Handspring and you already have an existing Sprint PCS account, then you will need to contact Sprint PCS to activate this phone. Activation is a fairly simple step of just calling Sprint PCS up and then a few minutes later, your phone is up on the network. The Sprint PCS Vision features take some time to propagate through the system but you will be able to use the voice features of the network in no time.

If you wish to upload data to the PDA, then you will need to insert the included CD into your system and run the setup files. As with all Palm based devices, you can either synchronize with the Palm Desktop or with Microsoft Outlook. Since I'm a Microsoft Outlook user, I chose to install the Outlook conduits which include Chapura's PocketMirror standard software. If you are using Microsoft Outlook 2003, you may need to go to Chapura's website and download the latest version of PocketMirror. The version that was included in the Handspring CD is older than the one available on the Chapura's website. This older version did not work well with Outlook 2003 on my system and I was forced to upgrade to the latest version. Once the upgrade was made, I was able to synchronize with Microsoft Outlook. If you have other Personal Information Managers (PIM), then you will need to purchase third party applications to aid in synchronization.

Synchronization takes place when you connect the USB cable to the Treo 600 and press the HotSync button. The typical Palm HotSync sequence will occur and data between your PIM and the Treo 600 will be synchronized.

USB cable connected	Syncing	USB connected to my system

You can use the Palm HotSync at the same time that Microsoft's ActiveSync application is running. I synchronized to both the Treo 600 and the HP iPAQ without a problem. However after using the Treo 600, I have to wonder whether there is any reason that I will use my HP iPAQ again. However, I do still believe that ActiveSync is a far superior synchronization application than Palm HotSync. The ability to sync whenever changes occur in Outlook is a great feature from ActiveSync.