Add it all up for the year, and it can be about 17,000-25,000 minutes of airtime to check messages once an hour with the average call being 2-3 minutes. Annually, that will be about $50 for the Treo Mail service, plus $240 for Earthlink, and up to $2,400 for the airtime, plus calls and SMS, which are also extra. Data calls add to plan minutes and SMS messages are sold in blocks for about $.06 each. These fees add up to an annual mail cost estimate of $2,690 or a whopping thirty cents a message for 25 messages a day! I could fly on at least ten round trip airfares for that price.

On the Blackberry, unlimited mail with the "always on" function is about $600 per year, a better value given its superior performance. Also, during those hourly mail exchanges on the Treo, you can't be making a voice call or using the Treo device to look up a number without canceling the replication. This is a limitation related to Palm's single threaded OS. Another problem is that the Treo really starts to diminish the battery life when on data calls, such as when checking mail or using MSN Messenger or Blazer. It acts like voice time because it's using a standard connection.

Chat and SMS
I believe that the success of PDAs in the future will be tied to communication, and so does Handspring. This evolution happened in the PC world as well. Cell phone users are everywhere and are even more prevalent in Europe and Asia. People are talking all over the place--in cars and at cafés and restaurants. There's no regard for others, and cell phone etiquette is at an all time low. With the Treo 180, I can instant message chat on AOL, Yahoo, or MSN Messenger without annoying the people around me.

This function has been great, as I can now exchange dialogue with co-workers and friends without announcing my plans to half of Starbucks. The limitations are that the airtime minutes are adding up at voice rates, and I'm not able to receive voice calls when online chatting. The Treo dials in with an internal modem like a regular PC, with the modem tying up the phone much like a teenage daughter.

With Short Message Service, calls are unaffected. This is a great tool for quick messages, but not everyone is SMS capable, even if their phone supports it (and not every message is a short message). For example, Nokia's phone OS is great for making calls, but it's not so great when it comes to SMS. No matter how much they try to claim it's simple or easy to use, a message like "Hello, I am on the way" requires deep menu navigation and then keypad input of "443355555566604440260666660844330989999". Either that, or you need the confidence of pressing the numbers once and having the phone OS interpret the message right using the auto-text feature. It's yet another "scripting" function where blind faith in the developers is supposed to make us feel comfortable.