Bad Lockup? Or Good Energy Saver?

I have noticed lately that one of the good but misunderstood features in the Treo 680 is the energy saving features. With the new features the Treo has a great knack of turning the screen off when it's doing something that you can't affect. An Example is when the system restarts and the phone is turning on and searching for signal. The system would normally be unresponsive at this time, but the screen would be on. Now at times like these the screen goes black!

The problem with the nice feature is that it took me 3 months to realize this was happening. Instead every time this happened and the system seemed unresponsive I would get impatient and do a reset. DOH!

Now that I am aware of how the system is trying to save energy I am more patient and have noticed many areas where it is doing so. It does this now when I am updating Quick News in the morning or when I am doing a long backup. The old 650 would stop syncing quick news when I turned off (or it automatically) the screen.

So needless to say this is a very nice little power saving feature that a newbie to a 680 may not recognize as such right off the bat.

Hidden Gems

One of the thing I LOVE about the Treo680 is that I keep finding LITTLE things that annoyed me with my 650 that I didn't realize the FIXED in the 680.

One perfect example is the ringer to the headphone out. On the 650 whenever I would use my highend headphones to listen to my music and someone would call my eardrums would get blown out (figuratively of course). The ringtone would shoot into the headset at RINGTONE volume, not music volume and BAM.

Well with the 680 last week I noticed that when I got a call while listening to music with my headphones, the ringtone no longer go to the headphones just the external speaker.

HOW WONDERFULLY FANTASTIC.

Another little hidden suprise I have found after 5 months owning the Treo.

I never LEARN. Giving Java another chance!

So it's that time again. Where I set myself up for a "why did I do this AGAIN" moment.

Java has been available for my past Treo 600 and 650 devices. On each device I had installed Java multiple times in hopes of some great new revelation I guess. Each time the only thing I realized was there were no apps I NEEDED Java for, it took up TOO MUCH space and frequently crashed my device. Of course later on there would be a release of a Java app that would make me do it all over again. I also found that the only way to completely get RID of Java's influences on my device was to do a Hard Reset.

Now I have a Treo 680 and a new version of Opera is out and a Gmail app (now mind you I use Xpress mail for my gmail and DON'T NEED a gmail app ... but why not. And Blazer on the 680 works fine for almost all of my purposes)

Well I was able to JUSTIFY installing Java again to try these new apps, because my 680 has 3 times the internal space, adn because I HAVEN'T TRIED IT YET on my 680.

The short of it is ... for a Tweaker I like having it. It opens up a different world of things to try and get working. Also I REALLY like the new version of Opera Mini for the Treo. It's a nice browser with nice features. The Gmail app does little for me, but I keep it on the device anyway for now. I have TRIED to get some Java Games (like SIMS 2 and others) that weren't necessarily made for the Treo680 to work ... and I was mostly unsuccessful.

For now unless something changes and the Java App seems to be negatively affecting my Treo I will keep it on the device and keep playing with it. I'll let you know if anything changes.