TamsPalm - the Palm OS Blog

cool nytimes article on new Treo
:
May 18, 2006
David Pogue
May’s Treo Leapfrogs Past January’s
THE electronics industry operates like a very expensive game of leapfrog. You buy something in April, and then a newer, faster, less expensive version comes out in May. Rats!

On the other hand, you might get lucky; you might not buy in until the better version comes along. There you sit on the train, on the plane or at the baseball field, smugly looking over at the poor saps who bought last month’s phone, music player or camera.

If you’ve been shopping for a smartphone — a multipurpose cellphone with Tic-Tac keys for tapping out e-mail — the game is picking up speed. This week, Palm unveiled the latest model of its popular Treo phone, the 700P, only four months after the previous one.

The Treo has found a special place in the hearts of the upwardly technical. It offers a beautiful phone that fits sweetly in your hand, displays photos on a big, bright touch screen, does e-mail and Web browsing just about as well as a cellphone can — and doubles as a Palm organizer, effortlessly synchronizing its calendar, address book and Microsoft Office documents with your Mac or PC.

All-in-one gadgets rarely do any single job as well as a dedicated one (think scanner-printer-fax machines or camera-music players). But the Treo has always come deliciously close.

Somehow, Palm has managed to pack into it a BlackBerry-style keyboard (brightly illuminated, at that); a physical switch that silences all sounds (which, as the overture begins, you can hit without even taking the thing out of your pocket); a built-in digital camera; a voice-memo button that can also record phone calls (which is great to have when someone starts rattling off driving directions over the phone); a slot for an SD memory card (to hold more music, photos and videos); a removable battery (4.5 hours of talk time, 300 hours standby); and a five-way rocker switch that lets you operate most functions with one hand.

Somehow, all of this works together without becoming a train wreck of complexity.

IN January, Palm released a model called the Treo 700W, which shall henceforth be known as the Blessing/Curse Upgrade. This model was even sleeker (2.3 by 4.4 by 0.9 inches), faster (312 megahertz) and more capacious (60 megabytes of free memory). More important, it brought sunshine into the lives of business travelers by hopping onto Verizon’s and Sprint’s superfast cellular networks (known as EV-DO). For a price, you could do your Internet duties at something approaching cable-modem speeds.

The 700W also introduced a better, higher-resolution camera (1.3 megapixels), dedicated Talk and End buttons, and even more refined domed key shapes that are easier to hit with flailing thumbs.

The curse is that instead of the efficient, refined Palm operating system, this model ran a mobile version of Windows.

Cramming Windows into a Treo was calculated to turn the heads of corporate buyers whose motto is, “Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.”

But from an elegance standpoint, it was a bizarre move. On the 700W, rough spots and design mismatches stuck out like a handful of sore thumbs. There was an OK button that actually meant Cancel, and a Start menu that fit only seven programs. The date book permitted appointments to begin only on the half-hour; the Calendar and Address Book buttons were replaced by menu commands (which required more taps to operate); and the on-screen Mute and Speakerphone buttons were hidden in pop-up menus.

What connoisseurs of good design really wanted, of course, was a phone with the modernized hardware of the 700W but with the more logical Palm operating system.

Good things come to those who wait. The 700P is the Windows Treo without the Windows, and it’s almost everything you’d wish it to be.

That is, it offers all the same hardware perks of the Windows Treo — the high-speed Internet, better keyboard, Talk and End keys, sharper camera, improved specs — while sticking to the more efficient Palm operating system.

Here’s the Home button, back where it belongs; one press takes you to a complete list of every program on the machine. (And here’s the optional list view, absent on the Windows version, which lets you see 22 programs at a time without scrolling.)

Here, too, is Palm’s Blazer browser, which blasts Web pages onto the screen much faster than the 700W’s Internet Explorer; if you’ve signed up for the high-speed Internet service, then streaming radio, music and video clips are a joy.

And here, praise be, is the bright, 320-by-320-pixel touch screen that the Treo used to have — not the 240-by-240 one on the Windows version.

In some ways, in fact, the 700P leapfrogs past the 700W and offers a few nice touches all its own.

For example, the slide-show, movie-playing and audio-playing programs all have a consistent, modern look. Not that you’re likely to choose a phone based on its slide-show software, but you can now attach a voice comment to each slide, if you so desire.

The Palm’s miniature copy of Microsoft Office, called Documents to Go, is now burned right into the Treo’s circuitry so that it no longer eats into the 60 megabytes of free memory that’s available for your use. You can open Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF documents, even when they’re sent as e-mail attachments.

Far more important, the 700P and its first carriers (Sprint and Verizon) have embraced the miracle known as dial-up networking. That’s the feature, often frowned on by the carriers, that lets your laptop get online over the phone’s high-speed connection.

You can connect the laptop to the Treo either with a cable (Windows only) or wirelessly, using a Bluetooth connection (Mac or Windows). In that case, the phone remains in your pocket, invisibly treating your laptop to high-speed e-mail, chat and Web service.

Some have knocked the Treo 700 family for its lack of Wi-Fi wireless networking; the 700P doesn’t even accept Palm’s $100 Wi-Fi card. Then again, if you can get online through the high-speed cellular network in hundreds of big cities, why limit yourself to scattered hot spots here and there?

The 700P is so capable, elegant and satisfying to use that it’s likely to make more people than ever ask: “Should I get the Treo or the BlackBerry?”

Both devices work with e-mail, both personal and corporate. (The new Treo comes with presets for AOL, Gmail, Earthlink, Apple .Mac, Hotmail, Yahoo, Exchange ActiveSync and many e-mail services.) Verizon’s Treo even offers wireless real-time “push” synching of your e-mail and calendar with your Windows PC back at home, as long as the computer is left on — a cool, BlackBerry-ish trick.But the BlackBerry doesn’t take movies or photos, doesn’t have a touch screen and has no library of 10,000 add-on programs — from tip calculators to subway maps — as the Treo does. (That’s precisely why corporate technical managers love it; a closed system is simpler to troubleshoot.)

If you ultimately opt for the Treo 700P, go download a shareware scientific calculator for it. You’ll need one to figure out how much all of this goodness will cost you.

The Sprint version costs $550 or $400, depending on whether you sign up for a one- or two-year contract. Unlimited high-speed EV-DO service starts at $15 a month, including a TV channel and a Sirius satellite radio channel (not including the price of a voice plan). Unfortunately, that doesn’t include using the Treo to get your laptop online, which costs another $40 a month.

Verizon’s version of the 700P costs $400, after rebate, when bought with a service package, like $110 a month for 1,350 minutes of talking and unlimited high-speed Internet. Here again, the dial-up networking for your laptop costs extra: $15 a month.

(Don’t forget to leave $140 in the budget for inMotion’s tabletop stereo speaker system/Treo dock. The Treo slips into it, the better to pump out your music collection as it recharges—and when a call comes in, the music stops and the device turns into a crystal-clear speakerphone. Cool.)

So what’s the downside of the new Treo? It’s expensive, of course. And because it works on the Sprint and Verizon networks, it doesn’t work overseas. (If history is any guide, a Treo 700P designed for Cingular and T-Mobile will appear later in the year. Those are the G.S.M. networks, the European standard.)

Otherwise, the new Treo itself is a joy — a communicator with immense power and potential whose software is a help instead of a hindrance. If you’ve held off on a smartphone until now, congratulations; you’ve played this game of high-tech leapfrog like a pro.

E-mail: Pogue@nytimes.com

Hi,
a good review that you have online there!

Best regards
Tam Hanna

cellular fax modem…

This article describes how to configure Microsoft Fax so that your modem automatically answers the phone to receive incoming faxes……

The Treo 700P is probably the worst smartphone I’ve owned thus far. Consistanly locks up at least once a day. I have had Verizon send me 4 replacements over the last 2 years as their are constant issues with performance. I would suggest that for corporate use, the Treo is not the answer.