A couple of days ago, Julie Strietelmeier of Gadgeteer wrote a piece called The Treo 650 (Can a Smart Phone Become My Main Brain?). The most interesting part of the article is that she discusses using a Treo 650 on Verizon Wireless, where that handset is officially unsupported at the moment. The article says:
I started wondering if the Treo would be a good phone for me. It was available for the Verizon network. But PalmOne had recently come out with a newer model, the 650. The only carrier with the newer model was Sprint, and like Cingular and AT&T, coverage at my house was pretty much nil. I didn’t want to buy an older model like the 600, so just put it out of my mind….
The 650 instantly jumped back into my mind earlier this week when I decided to do an eBay search on “Treo 650 Verizon”. Instantly I found people selling hacked phones ready to activate. No cables, or hacking needed. I didn’t need to procrastinate any more, I pressed the Buy It Now button and had myself a Treo 650 for $659 with next day shipping included.
This article really gets into all of the details of activating a Sprint-branded Treo 650 on Verizon, with the exception of the first step, converting the Treo from Sprint PCS to Verizon Wireless in the first place. One of the first places where the conversion discussion appeared was in this thread on TreoCentral. If you head for the latter pages, progressively easier techniques for doing the conversion are discussed.
BTW, if you are buying a Sprint Treo 650 from Amazon.com to convert to Verizon, make sure you choose the one that doesn’t require a contract. The handset currently costs $599.99 when you buy it like that.
I make note of this whole thing because a friend of mine was telling me at a meeting that he’d love to have a Treo 650 if he could get it to work on Verizon. How badly do you want it JoeP?