Well, I was skeptical, but may be converted. I really didn’t think I wanted a thumboard on the phone. but on the busride home today I just wrote 500 words of a 1500 word rough draft. That’s many, many more than I was ever able to get done using Grafitti on the old Palm.

I am also finding I use the menuing keys to do normal computery things that were always a giant PITA under earlier Palm OSes – like cutting and pasting data from one app to another.

The latest update in the continuing recording-phone-calls quest is twofold. On Monday, the only shipping dual-mode headset for the Trreo arrived, the Seidio 2-in-1 headset. This headset is not really the model I wanted, I just need it now, and the other listed models are currently out of stock.

Unfortunately, right out of the box, it was apparent that the headset sufferes from overly delicate cabling, as it was not so much a stereo headset as a mono headset, with signal intensity randomly adjustable by fiddling with the base of the cable near the elbow join. Feh.

I have an RMA, but it does not appear that MobilePlanet will eat the return freight or that they will overnight a replacement to me.

Further exploring the Treo front, I have been in copious correspondance with Toysoft‘s Danny Wong, the developer of PAR. He has been very prompt, if SMS brief, in replying to my messages.

Unfortunately, this morning, he informed me that “you CAN NOT record conversation with the headset.” Coming from the developer, I’m inclined to take that as accurate, although it differs from what various posters in Treo-oriented fora have indicated. I’m continuing to work with him to try to figure out why I haven’t been able to get the headphone button to work as a record-activation button.

I’m not done working this yet, though. My last hope is a device that would provide ‘loopback’ to the audio-in part of the headphone jack, adding the remote speaker’s voice to the feed after it’s hit the mic and earphone. It’s possible a piece of gear I currently have will do the trick, although I’m loth to bring gear to the picture.