This post was published 1 year 9 months 1 day ago which may make its actuality or expire date not be valid anymore. This site is not responsible for any misunderstanding.

Now you can have what I call the moldy green donut on your Treo 750–that new Microsoft symbol, which replaces the waving flag in the WM6 OS. Upgrade your Treo 750 Windows Mobile 5 system to Windows Mobile 6. It has been long promised and is finally available as a free download at http://www.palm.com/us/support/downloads/treo750update/att.html. Actually, it has been available since December 2007, but I missed it and thought some of you would appreciate knowing about it. Or, you can simply purchase a new Treo 750 with WM6 pre-installed.

What are some of the advantages of upgrading?

There are many improvements over WM5, and there are many articles detailing the virtues of WM 6. A good please to start if you want to learn about WM6 features is with Rich Hall’s article in Smartphone and Pocket PC magazine: http://www.pocketpcmag.com/_archives/jun07/wmsix.aspx. But let me gloss over some of the highlights to give you an incentive.

· Use your 750 as a modem for your laptop.

· There are several email improvements that allow HTML emails for receiving tables, colored text, bullets, etc.

· A smart filter allows contact searches on exchange servers.

· Send an out of office message from your 750.

· Email hot keys let you press R for reply, A to reply to all, and M to move an email to a folder.

· Access a company Sharepoint for document retrieval via HTML email links.

· Downloading is faster and great for large attachments, streaming etc.

· System sounds bug has been updated.

· Enjoy a more secure environment to make IT managers happy.

· The Calendar has been improved with a new top line bar in the agenda view showing when you are free/busy or have conflicts. Display meeting attendees, contact info, acceptances, reply to or forward meeting inquiries.

· Issue voice commands over Bluetooth in English, French, or German.

· Enjoy USB cable charging for the first time.

· Mute or put calls on speakerphone with single tap from active-call screen.

· Experience streaming video within 3G coverage areas.

You can feel comfortable that almost all of your old Window Mobile 5 applications will continue to function under WM6. But it’s probably also a good time to take advantage of new functionality as developers issue WM6 upgrades. All the same Palm enhancements to the Windows Mobile platform remain intact.

Supposedly, WM6 will sync quickly with Vista’s new Sync Center. Frankly, I have found that it hardly ever works, and the Sync Center is really worthless, at least on all my Vista computers. This is a project I want to explore but have not had time to get into yet. I’ll share my results when I delve into it.

Note that there is only one upgrade allowable per customer and is only available through October 31, 2008. Be careful that you do not interrupt the download or run other applications once the upgrade starts or you could experience some difficulties.

I have noticed in the forums that some people have experienced problems in making the transition, but never fear, there’s lots of help available. I encourage you to convert and to get a moldy, green,revolving donut on your machine. I did, and I love it.

I also want to take this opportunity to congratulate Palm and to express my appreciation for being among the few manufacturers to offer a WM6 upgrade. Most want you to buy a whole new machine. I appreciate it all the more because it is free. Thank you Palm.

Tim Hillebrand (105 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook