The number of different electronic devices that people are likely to own in this day and age is staggering.  You have your cell phone, iPod, PDA, laptop, digital camera…  After a while it gets to be tiresome.  Your pants are falling down from the weight of all these devices.  But you need, or at least want, to be able to make calls, listen to music, manage your contacts and appointments, check your email, and snap a few photos, and you want to be able to do it all on the go.  What’s a modern technophile to do?

The answer is simple — get a device that does all of that stuff.  Or at least it seems simple on the face of it.  But when you dig deeper, it becomes a case of multiple compromises.

I was faced with this dilemma myself, and responded by buying a Palm Treo 650.  I love it because of how it integrates all the different things I need to do into one cohesive package.  You can manage your phonebook through Outlook and attach pictures to your contacts so their ugly mug pops up whenever they call you; you can specify that you are meeting with a certain contact in your datebook; you can set a reminder on a to-do item; you can set the phone radio to automatically turn on and off a certain times.  And of course, it’s great to only have to lug around one device rather than five.

But there are numerous problems as well.  For example, the phone reception is mediocre.  I use Verizon, which supposedly had good reception, but I’ve been in places where my phone has no service and the Verizon phone of the person right next to me has four bars.  To add insult to injury, the thing chimes at me at the rate of once every ten seconds or so when it can’t find a signal - unless I put it into silent mode, which I usually don’t want to do. 

Furthermore, the phone volume is low, and Bluetooth headset volume is even lower, unless you buy a program called VolumeCare that raises the volume to acceptable levels.  And you can’t use MP3 ringtones unless you buy yet another program.  When you miss a call, it only displays a flashing star in the upper-left corner of the screen; if you want it to display an actual alert window, you have to — you guessed it — buy another program.

Then there’s the camera.  Okay, so I’m not going to lug my digicam everywhere I go anyway.  It’s not happening.  So having the camera on my phone is nice because I can snap a picture whenever I see something interesting.  If only the picture quality weren’t terrible.  Okay, so as VGA cameras go this one isn’t too bad, but that doesn’t change the fact that the maximum resolution is 640×480.  If I snap a nice photo, forget about using it as my desktop background.  With cameraphones in the States reaching two megapixels, and those in Korea reaching 7MP, only having a VGA-quality camera is inexcusable.

The Treo comes with RealPlayer as part of the preload.  Awesome, so I can use it instead of my iPod if I want to crank some tunes.  Unfortunately, you’re limited in the amount of music you can store by the SD slot, which only allows up to 2 GB.  I have 30 GB on my computer and iPod, so it’s kind of annoying to have to whittle my collection down so much (I’m also only using a 1 GB card).  It would be really nice if Palm would bite the bullet and put in a 6 GB microdrive like they used in the iPod mini so I could store more tunes.

Then, of course, Palm couldn’t be bothered to put in a standard 3.5mm headphone jack; they used a 2.5mm one instead.  That’s great for wired hands-free headsets, but to use regular headphones I need to use an adaptor that I’m pretty sure is slowly destroying the jack because it puts too much strain on it.  Once the jack is dead, I’d use Bluetooth headphones, except that the Treo only supports monaural headsets and not stereo headphones over Bluetooth.

You might think that the Treo is just a bad convergence device, but it’s actually probably one of the best.  Samsung produces the i730, but according to a friend that traded his Treo for an i730, the Treo is easier to use and better as a phone.  HP produces some iPaq phones, but they’re notoriously unreliable.  HTC (producer of the Audiovox XV6600, which is called other things on different networks) has only recently begun producing decent devices that give the Treo a run for its money.

I’m sounding awfully down on the Treo, but really, I do like it.  The PDA functions work flawlessly; my pants don’t fall down because I’m carrying three million devices; the phone works well enough despite the relatively poor reception; the fact that I can store any music at all is nice; and the camera is merely a convenience feature.  Yes, there are a lot of compromises, but the cross-functional integration and the fact that it’s many devices in one are very nice.  However, if you want a full-featured gadget experience, maybe you should look into a man-purse instead of a convergence device.