Does anyone know if a Palm Treo 650 can be used as a voice recorder?

Yup.

SoundRec: http://www.infinityball.com/

I'm not sure if it can record directly to the SD card though, so you might have a short-term recording limit of however much memory you have.

I've been looking for a new phone too.

It turns out my reception on all networks is terrible in two main places: (1) where I live, and (2) where I will work. Calls are... decipherable (mostly) on the stretch of freeway betweeen. I've never known cell quality generally to be so bad, especially as I now live in Silicon Valley.

But I do have a WiFi network at both the places, so I've been looking for a phone that switches between Skype via WiFi and a cell provider via GSM. I will have a fixed line at the office too, and I want to find a solution where there appears on the outside to be only one phone number for me.

Any ideas?

Kevin,

Simple solution is forget the Skype/GSM combo and go with a sat. phone.

Quote from Kevin: "But I do have a WiFi network at both the places, so I've been looking for a phone that switches between Skype via WiFi and a cell provider via GSM"

Sounds like you are looking for a phone that provides Unlicensed Mobile Access or otherwise known as the UMA specification. This specification allows phones to automatically switch between cell and wi-fi networks. Just lookup UMA service or UMA phone in Google and see what you come up with. Be warned this is a new technology so its still getting its feet wet. Here is a link just as an example:

http://www.brighthand.com/default.asp?newsID=12396

Potentially you could lose the landline completely with this solution since you could pickup service while at home through your home wifi 802.11b/g router and broadband internet service. The phone interacts directly with the internet on its own with its built-in automatic provisioning and wouldn't need a computer to function. TI's Davinci chip Rocks!

Cool - thank you !

Hmmm... it seems that T-mobile are rolling out UMA in Seattle on Sept 12th. I'll hold my breath till they roll it out in Silicon Valley. The UMA phones don't look that special - I wonder whether Blackberry will make a UMA model?

"But I do have a WiFi network at both the places, so I've been looking for a phone that switches between Skype via WiFi and a cell provider via GSM. I will have a fixed line at the office too, and I want to find a solution where there appears on the outside to be only one phone number for me.

Any ideas?"

Plug your landline into a SIP box and route your VOIP calls over EDGE and Wifi? That's pretty much what I do.

Also mVoice, www.motionapps.com, which will certainly record to an SD card. I have 3.5.1, have not bothered to upgrade to 5.0 yet.

Rand, I highly recommend trying the Treos side-by-side with other phones before buying one.

I had to buy a new phone last month, and was surprised that Verizon finally had live demo phones in the store, and even allowed outgoing local calls on them. I called my girlfriend on all of the phones I thought were at least semi-interesting, intent, though, on buying a Treo.

Tests like this are bound to be somewhat subjective, but one result was (unfortunately) unambiguous: the the audio quality on the Treos was worse than that of any other phone we tested, by far. The outgoing calls were particularly bad. The other party hears extreme levels of background noise. (My girlfriend was able to hear other conversations in the store better than I could.)

The best quality, for the record, was that of the Motorola e815. It still had slightly more background noise that my previous StarTAC 7868w (may it rest in peace) which we compared side-by-side with the other phones. It was adequate, though, and furthermore its radio seems to be stunningly good, so that's what I picked up. I'll unfortunately be sticking with that and a separate bluetooth PDA for the time being, until a Treo with decent audio quality comes out.

(I'm very interested to hear other people's opinions after similar tests. I surprisingly haven't found any throrough, trustworthy, comparative reviews of cell phone quality on line. It would be great to hear what other people find.)

I'm partial to the Blackberry's with the keyboard keypad (have a 7290 right now). That and fiddling with the stylus seems akward compared to the ease of the thumbwheel.

My Treo 650 has fine voice audio quality, though playing music through it might not do so well; the speaker is, of course, quite tiny. I did notice that for some areas, still using Verizon, the Treo has poorer reception than the LG model I had before. More memory would be a big help - the 700 has 60 mb available vs the 650's about 21 mb. There's a hardware upgrade in my (distant) future...

The problem is UMA just doesn't work all that well at the moment. You're probably better off with a Windows Mobile device with Edge which will run a Skype client well. I'd look at the range from HTC. They've really solved their battery problems over the last year, and the radio stability is much improved.

Alternatively, the GSM version of the Moto Q has pretty much everything people would need plus Blackberry like functionality but better back end email support.

PSS: The problem that all the PDA/Phone hybrids suffer from is the core technology. At the moment, you have to have a separate DSP, Radio and Application processor for something like a Palm, Blackberry, Symbian or Windows Mobile device. This puts huge demands on the internal architecture and makes relatively simple things like voice encoding and de-coding on the over-the-air interface much much harder.

There will be much improvement on this over the next 2 years, but we're still a way off having single chip solutions for Smartphones and PDAs like we have on most other GSM and CDMA "feature" phone solutions.

These have got better and there will be some great devices out next year with true global cell coverage with a single device delivering Quadband GSM/GPRS/EDGE, UMTS (WCDMA) and CDMA (2000) from a single radio stack. I've just moved over to Quadband + WCDMA so finally I can use my phone when I'm in Japan, but I'm still stuck hiring another phone in Korea. That should be a thing of the past in another year.

Hopefully, within 5 years we'll have software defined radio in the highest end phones and then UMA and everything you ever wanted should just work anywhere.

Dave, I actually think the noise problem (for the other party) was simply due to poor microphone placement. It looked like it was positioned on the bottom of the device, pointed downward. I don't know what the reasoning was for that, but it seemed more adept an listening to people other than the user. :)

Dave, I actually think the noise problem (for the other party) was simply due to poor microphone placement. It looked like it was positioned on the bottom of the device, pointed downward. I don't know what the reasoning was for that, but it seemed more adept an listening to people other than the user. :)

I have a Treo 650 and, yes, it can be used as a voice recorder. However, you have to buy and download a software called "mVoice" which costs about $20. You will also need an SD memory card (like 256MB or 1 GB) to store your voice recordings.

The palm website is where you can find several mVoice and several hundred other softwares for your Treo 650.

PSS: That's a common microphone configuration and background noise is frequently a problem on a wide range of devices. A lot of DSPs have hardware noise reduction which filters this, but it comes down to what you can fit into the package. The more stuff in there, the harder it is to fit it inside the Industrial Design.

Dave, I wasn't commenting on what might-or-might-not have been possible to do in a Treo, given the engineers' design constraints.

I was simply stating that the audio quality of Treo is manifestly inferior to everything else I tested. I didn't include my guess as to the cause in the original message because I thought it was irrelevant -- only the performance of the final product mattered to me when it came time to buy something.

Dave, I wasn't commenting on what might-or-might-not have been possible to do in a Treo, given the engineers' design constraints.

I was simply stating that the audio quality of Treo is manifestly inferior to everything else I tested. I didn't include my guess as to the cause in the original message because I thought it was irrelevant -- only the performance of the final product mattered to me when it came time to buy something.