If you’ve owned a Palm Treo device, you know that they don’t turn off. Really, they don’t. Holding down the power button will just put it into flight mode. To get it to completely shut off, you have to remove the battery. And then if you put the battery back it, it turns itself on! Argh. Why is this? We just got an answer from Mike Akamine, Senior Product Manager at Palm:

In Treo Pro we prioritized function by expected frequency of use. In order of frequency (most to least), we expected customers to use screen on/off, then flight mode, then completely off. We thought completely off is seldom used because there is a lot of value in the PDA functionality of Treo Pro even when the radio is off, and booting the system up from a complete off state takes about 60 seconds.

Mike is right – completely off is a seldom used state of a mobile phone, unless you’re like us, turning phones on and off for reviews and videos and such. Does it bother you that you can’t turn off Treo devices completely?