With a couple of months of the Treo 650 under my belt, I’m beginning to fill in a few feature gaps.
One package I’m currently trying a trial for is Central by Bluefish Wireless. Among the features that look particularly of interest to me:
- Being able to turn elements of the alarms (sound, vibration, LED) off during predefined intervals. Like, “Don’t ring my phone while in church.” Or, “DND until 5 a.m. on the weekdays, but 9 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday.” Also being able to manually turn this stuff off. Very useful, and something I had as an add-on with earlier Palms.
There is also an alarm function in Central that will override the DND settings, which is also nice. You can also set up the phone to turn off and on itself (vs. just having the sound and vibrator and LED turn on/off) at set intervals.
- Turn the phone back on after a reset. This is a recurring problem with Treos — if the phone reboots, the phone radio doesn’t always come back up, which is a problem. (There are eleventy-dozen utilities out there, including free ones, to do this.)
- Send a follow-up “bug me” beep/alarm when voice mail, missed calls, etc. are sitting out there. Again, this is a standard feature I’m used to in other cell phones. If I miss a call, for some reason, I may not see it if I don’t turn the phone on and see the visual reminder.
There are a lot of other little goodies that Central has, including the ability send an SMS “poison pill” code to delete all data on the phone — useful if you have confidential business data in there and your phone is lost or stolen. (The data can be restored by resyncing from your PC.) But the three above are the biggest
I’ll report back on how it works out.