Reviews
palmOne
Treo 650
This Treo has (almost) everything we wanted in the original
Handspring Treo 600
In
almost every respect, the original Treo 600 got everything right.
With it, Handspring gave us a smartphone that really deserved
its name. It was both an excellent phone and an excellent Palm
OS device, and Handspring did a bang-up job in integrating the
two functions. In our December 2003 issue, we actually called
the Treo 600 a ãphone with a built-in PDA.ä That's how close Handspring
came to putting everything into a small 7 ounce device that was
barely larger than your average cellphone of late 2003. The Treo
even had a built-in digital camera and there were both a GSM and
a CDMA version, making the device usable with a wider variety
of providers and services. In 2003, little ãRIM-styleä thumbtype
keyboards were all the rage, and we liked the one on the Treo
650. It was a bit weird to have a touchscreen, but no handwriting
recognition, but we got used to it.
Unfortunately,
Handspring did make a few design decisions that rendered the Treo
600 less useful than it could have been:
Its 144 MHz
Texas Instruments OMAP processor was a big improvement over earlier
Treos, but it wasn't nearly as quick as some of the Tungstens.
While the
Treo had a rather powerful 1,800mAH battery that we considered
quite adequate, it still only provided something like four hours
of talk time. Which meant a lot of people wanted a spare. Problem
was that the Treo 600's internal battery couldn't be replaced
and so you need a big, bulky external battery.
Lots of folks
were looking forward to using their Treo as a wireless modem for
a notebook. No can do, and no Bluetooth.
While the
internal 640 x 480 pixel digital camera was a nice touch (and
almost a must for a modern smartphone), it was near useless indoors.
And worst
of all, whoever decided to stick the Treo 600 with a murky, low-res
160 x 160 pixel display just didn't get it. High tech and low
res don't go together.
All of the
above combined to make the Treo 600 one of those ãthis is really
great but...ä devices and earned it just a ãBä rating in our initial
review.
Well, we're
happy to report that with the new Treo 650, palmOne has fixed
almost everything that was wrong with the Treo 600, and then some.
They didn't
really have to make the Treo faster, but they did. The 650 has
a state-of-the-art 312 MHz Intel PXA 270 chip.
The battery
is now removable so you can carry along a spare and pop it in
when you need it. That's a much better solution than a clunky
snap-on battery.
The camera
is still ãonlyä 640 x 480, but it now takes much better pictures
in low light. There's also a 2X digital zoom, and you can take
movies.
We had no
major problem with the Treo 600's keyboard, but the new one is
definitely better. It's a backlit affair with slightly larger
and flatter keys that make typing easier. The layout also has
subtly changed, for the better, and there are new ãsendä and ãendä
buttons.
We
really missed Bluetooth on the Treo 600. The 650 has Bluetooth
and you can use it to connect a notebook to the Internet.
There still
isn't a lot of memory, just 23MB for the user, but it's non-volatile
now, which means you'll never lose your data even if the battery
goes dead. Yeah!
You can now
listen to MP3 music via the built-in MP3 player. However, to do
so you need an expansion card.
And the biggest
news of all: the screen is now 320 x 320 pixels, as it should
have been all along. And it's a real TFT display and not an old-fashioned
CSTN LCD like the Treo 600 had.
Finally, with
the Treo family now part of palmOne, the 650 is using Palm OS
5.4 instead of the older 5.2.1H Handspring variant.
What all of
this means is that the 650 is a much, much better Treo. The high
resolution display alone would have made a lot of people happy,
but palmOne went well beyond that. You could almost say that while
the original Treo 600 was a ãproof of concept,ä the 650 is the
well-rounded and much more useful product its designers likely
had in mind from the start, but didn't have the time or resources
to build.
ö Kirk Linsky
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