I just had an inquiry from a new Treo owner who is looking his gift horse in the mouth:

My employer recently gave each of the salespeople a new Treo 650.  None of us requested it, in fact, a year ago we told management we didn’t want them.  Now we have them and can’t figure out why.  Our business is not dealing with life or death and we don’t send a lot of emails.  We carried cell phones before, and laptops too.

One thought (suspicion) is perhaps they got them for us so they could track us.  Without asking them, is there a way we can determine if our Treos are being used for such a purpose?

I couldn’t think of any way the Treo could be used for tracking — certainly no more than any other cell phone — but maybe I’m being naive. For example, if the company is running the Treos’ e-mail through their servers, they could be monitoring that…but is there anything more Treo-specific that might be going on here? Does anyone else have insights?

Within a few days of my post, Fido responded with a 100% perfect solution:

The $50 GPRS Unlimited bundle was added to your account. It was possible to do so as we have not yet fully converted to our new Billing platform - thankfully.

The usual condition is that customers will be able to preserve a non-existent bundle or price plan under a grandfathered clause, which is now applicable to you.

So a big thank you to the kind folks at Fido for taking pity on a Treo owner, extra bonus points for a quick resolution, and triple bonus points for responding far more rapidly than I have in my own blog. My only excuse is that I’m on vacation, with limited Internet access…an excuse that should be deleted from my repertoire, now that I’ve got ubiquitous access on the Treo!

29 days into my love affair with an unlocked Treo and I have discovered why it’s nice not to be married to any one cell phone carrier. I made the leap into wireless, thinking that Fido’s unlimited data plan offered a net; they’ve since pulled the plan, though existing subscribers are grandfathered in — for now. One of Fido’s customer service reps told me today that Fido is planning to scrap its unlimited plan altogether once it migrates to the Rogers network as of September 15th.

I’ve written to Fido, asking them to make good on the access plan I counted on when I bought my Treo. If nice Mark of Fido customer service had the story right, then other Fido customers may want to start whining, barking or growling to make sure they keep the unlimited data plan that they have now.

I’ll be sure to post news of Fido’s response. I’m hoping for a happy outcome but failing that will post details on what’s available in terms of alternative data plans with other Canadian carriers (suggestions more than welcome).

Here’s my letter; contact information included for the benefit of other would-be letter writers:

August 27, 2005

Formal Complaints
FIDO
800 Rue de la Gaucheterie
Suite 400
Montreal, PQ
H5A 1K3

fax: 514.937.2554

To the Formal Complaints department:

I am writing to request that you switch me to your unlimited data plan at a rate of $50 per month. I received a verbal commitment from one of your representatives that this plan would be available, and ask you to make good on that commitment.

On July 30 I purchased an unlocked Treo 650 while in the United States, at a cost of $600 US. I purchased this Treo after extensive research on different pda/phone options, and went to the trouble to purchase an unlocked phone during a US visit so that I could stick with Fido. I wanted to stay with Fido because I wanted to keep my Fido number, and because of your unlimited data plan. I know the easiest option would have been to buy your hiptop, but I had had the opportunity to review a hiptop for an article I wrote last winter, and while I was very impressed by it, my experience had convinced me it wasn’t the right device for my needs.

I returned to Vancouver after purchasing the Treo and immediately called to activate my data plan. The Fido representative I spoke with suggested that I start with the 5MB/$25 plan and see whether that met my needs, advising that I could always upgrade to the unlimited plan if my usage warranted it, and that I should simply call after reviewing my first bill on the wireless plan, since that would catch my usage halfway into a monthlong cycle, before I racked up major overages.

I received my first bill on this plan yesterday, and since I had a little over $36 in excess data charges, called today to upgrade to the unlimited plan. Imagine my surprise when I was informed that the plan was no longer available. I spoke with two people in your customer relations department, one of whom had little interest in trying to help me get grandfathered into the unlimited plan (as I understand you have done for people already on the plan – I suppose they were lucky enough to be advised to start with the unlimited plan and work down). Then I was very fortunate to speak with a terrific representative named Mark, who took some time to investigate the possibilities before advising me that the only thing he could do was to reverse that initial $36 in overages.

While I certainly appreciate Mark’s efforts to accommodate me on this first bill, that doesn’t begin to address the cost that I have incurred thanks to your precipitous change in data plans. I did a lot of research (six months!) before making my purchase, and would not have invested in a Treo if it were not for Fido’s unlimited data plan. (I wouldn’t have purchased a hiptop, either; I think I probably would have waited for the implementation of the CRTC decision allowing people to move their cell phone numbers to new carriers, anticipating new phone/pda and data options at that time.)

Thanks to your unannounced change in plans, I am now out-of-pocket some $720 Canadian for this device, not to mention the time I have invested in reorganizing all of my workflow in order to make the most of the Treo. (If you think I’m being dramatic, you can get a sense of how much time I’ve put into this transition by visiting http://www.alexandrasamuel.com/categories/treo/).

Mark mentioned that your upcoming transition to the Rogers system may result in the elimination of your unlimited data plan, which makes me all the more anxious to resolve this situation. At this point the only acceptable resolution is for you to either grandfather me into your unlimited data plan, or for you to waive any excess data charges for at least the next twenty-four months – the minimum amount of time I would expect to use a device that represents such a significant investment.

Since I have been tracking my Treo adventures on my blog, and since some of my fellow bloggers will be interested in the future of your unlimited data plan, I am posting a copy of this letter on my blog at http://www.alexandrasamuel.com/archive/fido-complaint/

Thank you in advance for your consideration, and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

I’ve been talking a lot about RSS on this site for some time now. And lately I’ve been talking about Treos too. Now you can have both great flavours in one thanks to this little demo of how the best sources of custom RSS feeds can help you find everything you want to know about Treo.

If you’ve just started using a newsreader like Bloglines or Newsgator, odds are that you’re subscribing to RSS or Atom feeds from your favourite blogs and news sites. But there are lots of other great sources of RSS feeds, including feeds that are tailored to your particular interests. So here are some of my favourite sources of high-value RSS feeds.

And if, like me, you are exploring the wide world of Treo, you might be interested in checking out the sample feeds below. If you click on each one you’ll be taken to an example: an RSS feed for “treo” from that source. Want to see how that can rock your world? Want to know more about Treo? Check out my 100% RSS Treo page.

1. the Technorati tag page will feed you blog posts about Treo
2. a Pubsub blog subscription will give you slightly broader results than you’re likely to get from Technorati, since it will be searching for Treo as a keyword rather than as a tag
3. PubSub newsgroup subscription will do the same thing for usenet group discussions
4. Dulance lets you set up an RSS search to track prices for products
5. a del.icio.us tag feed will give you all the latest web resources that people are storing on a given topic
6. BlogMarks offers more tag-based bookmark subscriptions, like the one from del.icio.us
7. the flickr feed will show you pictures taken on a Treo or of a Treo
8. the Organic Broadcast Network gives you an RSS feed linking to streaming video content about Treo
9. a Yahoo! news search will give you mainstream news sources on a given topic
10. and giving Yahoo! a run for its money is everyone’s favourite new kid on the RSS block, Google news

Bonus RSS feed: It’s not a Treo-related feed, but while on the subject of custom RSS feeds I have to tip my hat to the eternal geniuses that be Apple, where you can set up RSS feeds from the iTunes store, which let yo know about new albums in your favourite genres.

RSS hall of awkward blushes and shuffling feet…if not actual shame. These are the big mysteries — the sites that should offer custom RSS feeds but don’t:

Amazon should let me subscribe to an RSS feed that notifies me when they add a Treo-related item to their store.
eBay should let me subscribe to an RSS feed that notifies me when a new Treo-related item goes on sale.
The CNET/ZDNet empire should be downright embarrassed to be run tech news sites that don’t offer search-based topical RSS feeds.
• The generally wise and wonderful people over at 43things offer a nice range of RSS feeds, but they won’t let you subscribe to a search result on Treo. So how will I keep track of those who share my Treo dream? That reminds me…time to cross “get a Treo” off my list.
• Rojo is all about the feeds, and even lets you create a custom search on stories that have been tagged Treo, but does it then offer you an RSS feed of the search? No! Where will this madness end?
• a href=”http://www.consumating.com”>Consumating People lets you create tag-based searches of people you might want to date…like Treo owners. Really. So how is it that people this visionary realize that people who find dates via tags probably want to take care of the whole thing via RSS? It’s at moments like this that I sure am glad I’m married..and that they hadn’t invented RSS or tags back in my single days. How could anyone settle down when that perfect tag set could be one feed refresh away?

The extremely fabulous Leda Dederich asked me about how I’d handle tasks and notes after my switch from Entourage to Apple apps.

I was worried about losing “Tasks” too. Turns out they’re built into iCal! So no worries there.

Re: Notes, it’s a little more complicated. Anil Bawa says he decided to use Apple’s Stickies — like virtual postit notes — but I have a feeling I can do better. I’m thinking about using TiddlyWiki, a mini-wiki that has many devoted users and which I figure could be used on the Treo too, and with a little work, kept in sync. What I’m really going is something like the PersonalBrain software that Jerry Michalski told me about; it’s kind of like a wiki-mindmapping hybrid. But (argh!) it’s Windows only. Lucid Fried Eggs purports to be an open source effort to give a Brain to the rest of us, but I’m not sure it’s under active development anymore.

What I really want is something like a wiki — something that has a database backend and a mindmap-style GUI front end, with unlimited tags/keywords that can attach to every item so that you can navigate keyword-to-keyword, and with (of course!) outbound RSS feeds for each tag as well as for the whole enchilada. So, kind of a little more than Entourage’s built-in notes feature. It just seems stupid to use Word to take notes, when these flat-text files just keep my thoughts locked away and make them hard to find.

The other tool that Boris Mann points me to is OD4Contact. Since Boris’ offhand post re: buying an unlocked Treo is what tipped me over the Treo-purchase abyss, I’m inclined to follow-up on any tool that he tells me actually will make my life easier. I’m downloading it now — report to follow.

Well my Treo-ification is now well underway, which is to say that I’ve been immersed in the ever-exciting challenges of how to reorganize my life to be more Treo-friendly. (Oops — I meant to say, figure out how to use the Treo to live my previous life more efficiently.)

Here’s some of what I’ve figured out so far:

GPRS without a net:
Actually, you can’t just take an unlocked phone out of the box and go wild. Gotta figure out your carrier settings, which isn’t 100% easy. Here are the current settings for Fido.

PIMing:
Up until now I’ve been an Entourage user. (That’s what you Windows users call “Outlook”.) I have a recurring event in Entourage that reminds me to reconsider using Entourage every three months. Today, when the bell went off, I wondered whether the Treo might make the ultimate case for switching from Entourage to Apple’s own iCal/Address Book/Mail combination. (Note to developers: giving your software generic names like “Mail” and “Address book” makes it very very hard for nice people like me to find out about your software using the Google method.)

My mind was more or less made up for me by the fact that Entourage appears not to synch with the Treo 650, period. Cruised enough user groups to conclude that my problems were the norm and not the exception. But was it worth giving up the joys of all-in-one mail/task/calendar/contact integration?

Today’s documentation award goes to Anil Bawa for his blog post on
Switching away from Entourage which tells you everything you need to know about how and why to switch. Why: inter-application integration among the various Apple apps is actually more flexible than integration across Entourage features. How: just drag and drop your Entourage contacts into the Address Book; and in iCal and Mail, use the built-in import features and select the “import from Entourage” options.

Not only did Anil convince me that the switch would be quick, easy and useful, but his blog post was also the first place I found anyone saying that YES you can get date from Entourage to the Apple apps. With all the scripts and software out there, promoting their ability to effect this transformation, I had just about concluded that it would require special software before discovering Anil’s post. So thanks, Anil.

Of course I’m hoping that the Apple apps (including built-in handheld synchronization via iSynch) won’t be my complete long-term solution. The nice people over at Airset tell me that they’ll have iCal to Airset sync soon, at which point Airset may become my automatic way of keeping Treo and Mac in sync.

E-mail and messaging
Mark Surman told me that I had to switch from POP to IMAP if my Treo was going to work for me, so I spent last night clearing through a terrifying accumulation of e-mail before making the switch. (Greets to the 39 people who got overdue e-mails from me between 9:30 and 11:00 pm last night.) Now I’m ready to give up POP — which pulls mail onto my computer — and switch to IMAP — which leaves my email on the server, so it can be read by my laptop or my Treo.

But since I am but a lone woman in the high seas of the Internet, I have no IMAP service in place. After a little poking around, I settled on Runbox — again, a Mark recommendation — who offer hosted IMAP service for $29.95/year. That includes hosting my own domain, so my alex_at_alexandrasamuel_dot_com address still works; it’s just now an IMAP account over at Runbox. Note to world (and Runbox): if you’re redirecting your own domain’s email to work via Runbox, it takes a few minutes for e-mail hosting to switch over; possibly longer. Meanwhile your e-mails will bounce. Maybe Runbox could change its bounce message to alert people to the possibility that the email address they’re trying might in fact work again in a few minutes. Meanwhile, I advise making the switch during off-hours.

As for the challenge of reading e-mail on my Treo, I’ve decided to go with Chattermail over Snappermail or Versamail, thanks in large part to a helpful article at Boston College. They came down on the side of Snappermail but that was because Chattermail was still in beta at the time.

I will install Chattermail tomorrow — once I’ve got this whole Entourage switch wrapped up — at which point I’ll also try to get up and running on Mumbu as my IM client. MyTreo had a great article on different IM options that pointed me in that direction.

I’m hoping to resist any further software problem-solving for the next couple of days. But you can keep track of the Treo resources I’m uncovering by watching my Treo links on del.icio.us.

I called Fido — that’s my Canadian cell phone carrier — today to ask about GPRS settings for my new unlocked Treo 650. Since the settings they gave me are a bit different from those I found on various discussion boards I thought I’d post them here for the benefit of other would-be Fido/Treo users. (Note to my fellow Canadians: while Rogers is the only Canadian cell phone provider to offer the Treo 650, the dinky discount they give you on the Treo is going to be rapidly offset by the higher costs of service — especially data costs. So bite the bullet and order an unlocked GSM from the land of freedom.)

To configure the following settings on a Treo, go to the house menu (you know, hit the little button with a picture of a house on it), then choose the Prefs application. Under Prefs, select Communication/Network; then click the Preferences menu at the top of the screen and select Service/New. Call this connection GPRS and set the Connection type to…GPRS.

Now here are the settings Fido gave me (Treo implementation noted in brackets):

GPRS settings:
APN: internet.fido.ca
Username: fido
Password: fido
Dialup: *99# (not needed)

As usual, I accept no personal responsibility if this makes your phone burst into flame, if you buy a Treo in the US and then decide you don’t like it, or if your boyfriend already got you a Rogers Treo and now you’re kind of pissed about paying all those extra data charges. Happy mo-surfing.