Things I hate about my new Treo 650

Note on April 14: after all these struggles, rebuilding my Treo from absolute scratch (i.e. fresh desktop OS, hard reset of Treo, fresh install of Palm Desktop on pristine OS, a firmware update, and fresh install of my latest third-party software -- Bob's Alarm and SnapperMail) seems to have made my Treo usable again. For now. I'm leaving the post below intact in case others recognize their own predicament.

Several weeks ago, Cingular finally offered support for the Treo 650, so I signed up and got one. It has a better screen, Bluetooth support, and actually feels a little lighter than the Treo 600.

That being said, it's not feeling like much of an improvement. In fact, I'm not sure if it's my hardware, software, Cingular service, or what, but I'm experiencing serious pain. Thankfully, John Yunker has a detailed run-down of the problems I have been having, and I'm not the only one. Cingular, are you listening??

Here are my problems:

Voice mail: The "favorites" button for voice mail (which was installed by default) keeps reprogramming itself, which makes getting voice mail a pain. Where it is supposed to dial 415-XXX-XXXX, it will now randomly set itself up to dial a dozen or more zeroes, or just random numbers. Finally, I just put the voice mail number in my Memo app. It's not anything I'm doing, because it often resets itself to the proper number without any intervention from me. [Update on April 13: Looks like there is a firmware fix available now!]

Crash-o-rama. With no changes in over a week, the Treo 650 suddenly started crashing when I picked up an incoming phone call. People calling me reported hearing me pick up, then a quick busy signal as my phone rebooted. For a while, I could dial any number in the universe but my voice mail number -- that would cause the phone to crash.

My reading suggests that a new SIM card will solve the problem (some Gemplus ones are defective and Axalto SIMs have helped some people). In the meantime, for the voice mail problem at least, here is a workaround.

Update, March 24: I got a new Axalto card earlier today, and while my voice mail dialing troubles seem to have dissipated, I'm still getting weird crashes on incoming calls. Hmmm. Could just be an unstable app, but everything was fine with the 600. Stay tuned.

Update, March 30: Still a little flaky (some crashes when I pick up a call), but seems to have improved somewhat. The phone also seems to randomly reboot at times, not just when I'm picking up a call. I had the Treo 600 for about a year without these problems, so I don't think it's me.

Update, April 13: Some other ideas on how to fix this. I decided to wipe my Treo completely clean, install the Palm Desktop for Treo 650 on a Windows machine (I'm using a Mac), and sync from there to see if my problems go away. More later. . . . (keeping this how to do a hard reset link handy)