I've had my iPhone for just about two weeks.  The short version is that I wouldn't go back if you offered me a new Treo and free service to go with it.

The most important thing to me about a smartphone is the phone, and with that the contacts database.  I'm on the phone constantly; its my single most important business tool, beating even my laptop.  The iPhone is an excellent phone.  Sound quality is great, coverage (with AT&T) is about equivalent to what I had on my Treo 700p (Sprint), it's easy to use and works a treat.  I have had some dropped calls, more than I would have expected or really wanted.  On the other hand my Treo would crash constantly, including during calls, so the iPhone is still a winner.  It's easier to search for contacts on the Treo - you just start typing in the Phone app.  On the iPhone, I have to launch the Phone app, click Contacts, and then scroll to the top of the alphabet if I'm not there already in order to start typing in the search box.  Also, on the Treo I could display contacts based on the groups they're in, which is very handy.  On the iPhone, I can display local contacts or grab them directly off of the Global Address List on the corporate Exchange server.  The iPhone is ignorant of the categories I've assigned to contacts, which is disappointing. Speakerphones are pretty good on both units.

The next most important thing about a smartphone for me is the calendar.  Here the iPhone trounces the Treo.  It syncs my calendar over the air and it allows me to accept or decline meeting requests, both things that the Treo couldn't do.  The one minus side is that any appointment I enter on the iPhone is immediately visible to my coworkers, and there's no "Private" box I can tick if I don't want to publicize what I'm up to.  I can only mark appointments as private in Exchange.

Next on my list is email.  Here the iPhone finishes the race, holds a press conference, goes out to dinner and has sex with its girlfriend before the Treo rounds the last turn.  It's quick, it's easy to read, it's easy to type, it handles more sorts of attachments better.  It's absolutely outstanding.  One of the account managers at work needed me to review a quote immediately, but I was an hour away from being able to stop the car and review it on my laptop.  I was able to bring up the attachment and review it while stopped at a red light.  Minutes later I called her back and gave her some changes to make.  This is a huge improvement in productivity for me and I don't want to give it up.

Web browsing is next.  If this was a fight, the iPhone would have beaten the Treo to death with one hand behind its back and gotten not so much as a hair out of place while doing it.  The iPhone works with way more websites, and works better with every one of them.  Safari crashes sometimes, sure, but it crashes far less often than Blazer and it crashes cleanly to the Home screen, ready to be launched again immediately.  Blazer would frequently require a soft boot to make the phone usable again.

Games are next, for me.  Here the Treo is strong.  There are a lot of games, and plenty of them are plenty good.  Some of them I miss, and I'm hoping that Astraware and some of the other great Palm developers will be showing up on the iTunes Store soon.  The iPhone has some really fun games, though.  Aurora Feint (free) kept my wife occupied for a week, but it crashes at the higher levels and she's disappointed now.  Super Monkey Ball ($9.99) is hilarious, challenging and fun. Smart Sokoban ($4.99) is the best Sokoban game I've played on any platform, totally engrossing.  There are plenty of other worthwhile games on the iPhone, too.  I think that in a few months the iPhone will emerge as the clear winner here.

In the entertainment department, the Treo simply commits suicide in its jail cell.  It's guilty, it knows it, and it doesn't want to face the consequence of its lousy MP3 playback and pathetic video capability.  Thank goodness it spared society the cost and embarrassment of a trial.

Other apps are important, too.  There's a Pandora client for the iPhone.  It's free and it works a treat.  Loopt lets you see where your iPhone-equipped friends are via the GPS function.  Remote lets you control your iTunes from anywhere on your home wireless network. There are others that are pretty neat.  Again, I see the iPhone taking a clear lead within a few months.

I don't miss the Treo keyboard.  I'm already quicker on the iPhone keyboard, largely due to its predictive text entry and typo correction.  Once you learn to trust it and stop going back to fix typos, you're off.  For one-handed use, the lack of a stylus is a huge help.  The only thing the stylus had going for it is that I had replaced the stock implement for one that had a concealed pen.

The app launcher is what the Treo could have been if Palm hadn't stopped, apparently, doing development.  It's quick, it's clean, and it reminds me of my Treo.  It's just faster, prettier and easier to use.

There are only two things I used to do on my Treo that I'm living without right now.  One is a password database synchronized with my PC.  There's an iPhone option for that: SplashID costs about $30 when you include the PC component.  I'm holding out, though.  I've been using Secret! from LinkeSOFT for many years, and it has served me extremely well.  LinkeSOFT says that they're coming out with an iPhone version soon, and I'm prepared to wait for a bit.  The other big disappointment so far is the lack of a good ebook reader.  eReader is quite good but sharply limited, as it only works with titles you buy from Fictionwise.  Nothing else out there allows for easy offline ebook reading.  If Mobipocket would come out with a Mobipocket Reader for the iPhone, I would buy it right now.  I've got a ton of Palm Doc, HTML and Mobipocket titles that read great on the Treo.  With its sharper, bigger, and brighter screen, the iPhone would be an ideal ebook platform.  Hopefully someone will come out with something soon. Michael Atkinson.

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Jul 29, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Palm, Inc. (Nasdaq:PALM) today said it has sold its two-millionth Centro smartphone, confirming the $99 product's growing momentum with traditional mobile phone users who want to move up to a phone that offers more functionality.(1) Palm is now offering Centro in more than 25 countries in North America, South America, Europe and Asia Pacific.

Recent data released by AdMob, the largest advertising network on the mobile web, further echoes the momentum of Palm's smallest, lightest and most affordable smartphone. According to the company's Mobile Metrics report (www.admob.com/s/solutions/metrics), Palm Centro leapt onto the list of mobile phones worldwide in May as the No. 8 device, and moved up in June to No. 7. AdMob cites the growth of inexpensive phones, such as Palm Centro, as a primary driver in mobile Internet usage.

"Consumers are ready to do more on their mobile phone, and Centro has struck a chord around the world," said Brodie Keast, senior vice president of marketing for Palm, Inc. "Centro has everything a person needs to stay connected with everyone who is important to them -- and at a price point and size that make smartphones more attractive to a much wider audience."

Palm also showed strong growth among smartphone manufacturers, ranking No. 2 in the United States in mobile advertising reach, and No. 3 worldwide. The AdMob report, which analyzes worldwide data to gauge mobile Internet use among devices able to receive mobile ads, also noted that 24.3 percent of worldwide ad requests in June were from smartphones, up from 22.4 percent in May. As more consumers leave their traditional mobile phones behind in favor of moving up to phones with greater functionality, mobile web usage is expected to increase.

Now available from almost 20 carriers worldwide, including the three largest carriers in the United States, Centro has reached more young adults and women, as well as a broader range of household income, than any prior Palm smartphone. It offers customers an affordable, simple and fun option for staying connected and doing more with their mobile phones.

Centro's full QWERTY keyboard and color touch screen make it easy to quickly type text messages, respond to emails, start instant message conversations, browse the web and more. It offers all of the great organizer functionality for which Palm is renowned, such as a detailed and integrated contacts list and a simple and handy calendar for juggling business meetings and get-togethers with friends. Centro lets users "sideload" songs and manage music, audio books and videos easily(2), as well as shoot pictures or videos with the built-in digital camera.

More information about Palm Centro is available at www.palm.com/centro.

It looks like there is some movement in the Palm OS world of software development. Andrew sent in the following invitation- "Are you interested in testing your application for compatibility with Garnet OS (formerly Palm OS®) on ACCESS Linux Platform™ and cool devices like the Nokia N810, N800 and N770? ACCESS is hosting a Lunchtime Lab next week during the ACCESS Developer Day at LinuxWorld San Francisco on Tuesday, August 5th.

During the lab you can meet one-on-one with an ACCESS employee to test your application on hardware or simulator software and find out where there may be compatibility issues you would need to address.

The Lunchtime Lab is free and lunch will be provided. Space is limited so please RSVP in advance by emailing xxxxx. We will then send follow-up information detailing how to prepare to test your app.

The lab is part of the ACCESS Developer Day which you may also attend for free. Even if you will only visit the lab, you will need to register at the LinuxWorld Conference site. Use promo code --- for a free pass to the ACCESS Developer Day ($95 value)."

Murray at Palm-Mac has written an article called Apple...playing with the big boys which sums up the current Apple situation nicely. It always amazes me how many fanboys should to high heaven when things are going well, but say nothing when Apple screw up...

"Listening to a recent MacBreak Weekly podcast I think it was the one released on July 16th, one or two of the people on it were laying into Apple for what they perceived to be a gi-normous cock up of the 3g iPhone launch, subsequent fiasco on iTunes and mobile.me botch up. They were making the point that as Apple continues to grow and as it becomes a bigger company then it needs to realise that more can go wrong and that when it does go wrong, things need to be sorted out.

They have a point. I often think it cannot be easy being a huge company like, for example Microsoft, with a huge customer base to keep everyone happy. Apple, through the launch of mobile.me and its supposed Exchange like syncing, needs to realise that it is now playing with the big boys and needs to get things working from day one. Especially after all their self proclaimed fanfair about "exchange for the rest of us" hoopla. I don't think most users care two hoots what they want to call it, they just want it to work out of the box from day one and it quite plainly hasn't. "Exchange for the rest of us who aren't that fussed anyway about getting access to their email" would have been a fairer initial description."

If your Treo camera rubbish? Photos HQ is now priced at under $4 and claims to improve the photographic output from the Treo camera, which is usually not good...

Photos HQ is an application that lets you capture photographs of much higher quality than those created by the default camera software of your mobile phone. Photos HQ enhances the capture capabilities of devices with an VGA (640x480) camera and increases the resolution to 960x720 pixels by combining two consecutive images. Additionally, Photos HQ brings new features such as an improved digital zoom, a 10 seconds self-timer, a surveillance mode, and a picture-in-picture thumbnail showing the preceding photograph. Important notice: Photos HQ operates on current and probably future devices by detecting dynamically the capacities of each device (maximum size of the photographs, compression JPEG, memory cards, constraints related to the embedded memory). Certain functionalities may not apply to your device: please read the PDF tutorial to learn more about it.

The zTXT compression is done using zLib, a Free compression library released under the zLib License. This results in much smaller files than with the PalmDoc method. For example, the Project Gutenberg e-text of "The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood" is approximately 600K in size. Compressed as a zTXT, it is only 261K in size, while with PalmDoc it is about 330K. Since the Palm Pilots do not have very much memory, this is a big saving."

The UK based Mobile Data Association (MDA) has published its latest quarterly data report on mobile phone usage across the UK. The report covers activity from January - May 2008 for Text Messaging (SMS), Mobile Internet (MI) and Picture and Video Messaging (MMS) and identifies new trends in the way people are increasingly relying on their mobile phones.

All three measured metrics continue to grow; SMS has again surpassed expectations with 1.4 billion text messages being sent in the UK every week. Mobile Internet has seen steady growth in the UK; 16.5 million people accessed the mobile internet in May 2008. This represents a 25 per cent growth since May 2006, indicating an average 4,500 new users every day.

Picture and video messaging (MMS) is showing excellent and sustained growth, with volumes rising steadily supported by some interesting seasonal peaks. 10 million picture messages are sent every week in the UK and year-on-year growth is at 30 per cent.

Seasonal highs include December when new devices are purchased; this resulted in a massive 52 per cent increase or an extra 19 million messages in December 2007 alone... More at cellular-news.