In their infinite wisdom (?) on the 755p, Palm moved the camera, rear speaker, and stylus to different places than the 700p, and (here’s that VERY important difference).. switched from a standard SD card used on the 650 and 700p (and even the GSM 680) to a miniSD card on the 755p.

They also did away with the external stubby antenna, apparently for the “we hate external stubby antennas!” crowd. I LIKE the stubby antenna. It makes for a nice little handle to grab and wiggle the phone out of tight new cases. And I have yet to have a crowd of people recoil in horror and run away when they see me whip out a 700p with an external antenna. So I don’t know what all the fuss is about.

SD SD everywhere, but not a miniSD to drink

Having owned a Zodiac, two 650s, a couple of Tungstens, and two 700ps, I had piles of good old standard SD cards, but NOT ONE SINGLE miniSD card. Oy! How was I going to get all my data back into this new 755p? Start shopping list.

Further, because of the re-location of the camera, speaker, and stylus, NOT ONE SINGLE hard plastic or metal case or form-fitting leather designed to fit the 650 or 700p would work correctly with the 755p. I fudged the 755p into a hard, form-fitting 700p case for a while, but because of the design changes, I couldn’t even slide its stylus out, nor use the camera, nor barely hear the speaker.. they were ALL in different places, so the 700p hard cases’ cut-outs were ALL wrong for a 755p! Add to shopping list.

But wait, there’s more!

I reviewed Seidio’s monster 3200mAh “super extended” battery and have two of them and like them a lot. What’s a couple extra ounces of weight compared to the benefits a huge battery gets you? But I couldn’t use either one in the 755p.

After acquiring a new 755p Seidio “hybrid” hard case with a bulge on the back to accommodate their bulging battery door which is required to use the huge battery in the 755p, I learned that Palm, again, for some mysterious reason, changed some little tabs in the 755p’s battery compartment such that Seidio had to design and release a NEW model of the huge battery specifically for the 755p..

They warned me that trying to insert the super-extended I reviewed and use(d) in both my 700ps would damage the 755p’s battery compartment, due to the relocation of those tiny tabs.

And to top it all off, the 755p smacks of something commonly known in the auto industry as “de-contenting”, when a mfr. spews out a new model and as a cost-cutting measure, removes useful features that were on earlier years’, even last year’s version of exactly the same car.

Where’d the hole go?

In the case of the 755p, it’s probably the first hand-held anything I’ve ever owned that has NO RESET HOLE!. Yeah, in the 755p, it’s gone! God only knows why. To reset the 755p, Palm tells you to take off the battery door (an obnoxious chore in itself due to the way they badly redesigned the door’s unlock button), pull the battery, and re-insert it.

I get around this nonsense by using a tiny freeware program called “Reset me” by Prasys . Although the program is a few years old, I’ve put it on every Treo I’ve owned, and it works fine to reboot a 755p, as long as the phone has not locked up to a state where you can’t get to the apps launcher, and then you have no choice but to pull and re-insert the battery.

So, for the 755p, no more Seidio extended battery doors with a reset hole molded into them, because there’s no reset pin in the battery compartment! The tiny blue directional LEDs in the central five-way pad are gone too. De-contenting.

Palm also changed the keyboard – on the 755p, all of the keys that were white on the 700p are black, and vice versa. This takes some getting used to.

Conclusion

There’s more to this story, but I think you get the idea. The 755p is NOT just a slightly smaller 700p with the antenna lopped off.

If your 700p goes nuts, like one of mine did, and you’re forced into replacing it with a 755p, unless you want to carry it around naked with its stock battery and no external Storage, you’d better set aside some cash because at the very least, you’re going to need:

• a new case, if you like hard, form-fitting cases
• a miniSD card and possibly a card reader that can take them
• a new “extended” battery specifically designed for the 755p unless you’re happy with the (smaller) stock battery

For those of you who have Sprint 700ps and have installed Palm’s V1.10 MR and suffered no ill effects, congratulations. You’re luckier than I was. For those of you with a Sprint 700p still running firmware V1.08 (just go to your dial pad, use the menu key, and open up Options / Phone Info to find out), my recommendation is, if it’s working fine for you, leave it alone! I wish I had.

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