It’s now been 6 months since I purchased the Palm Treo 750 smartphone. As an upgrade from a Motorola V3i, lots of things were different. Going from a phone to a smartphone is not a small step. The new phone is great, and it has it’s fair share of good things and bad things. First of all, a quick summary:

Specifications:

Operating System: Windows Mobile® 5.0 Pocket PC Phone Edition with Direct Push Technology
Radio: GSM/GPRS/EDGE/UMTS radio (Quad-band)
Processor: 300MHz Samsung processor
Screen: 240 x 240 color TFT touchscreen display, 16-bit color
Connectivity: Bluetooth 1.2, Infrared (IR)
Camera: 1.3 megapixel (2x digital zoom)

Software:

The 750 comes pre-loaded with plenty of goodies. You get the standard suite of Windows Mobile stuff (Office Mobile, PIE (Pocket Internet Explorer), Pocket Windows Media 10), as well as Voice Command. The home screen is different than a regular Windows Mobile device, as it includes some Palm exlcusives (text/picture speed dials, direct phone number entry, text messages that queue up like an instant message conversation).

Pocket Windows Media 10 supports the new PlaysForSure DRM scheme from Microsoft, which means this phone can play protected content from providers like Napster or Y! Music. This essentially makes your phone an MP3 player.

Performance:

The phone overall feels fast. You generally don’t notice much lag when navigating from screen to screen, but if you have too many applications running at once you’ll start to see the device drag.

Data speeds are good, but not great. Obviously navigating on Cingular’s at&t wireless’ EDGE network isn’t that fast. Once you hit a city, the UMTS towers pick up the speed a little bit (up to 380kbps or so). The phone has the radio for HSDPA which would allow for speeds up to 900kpbs or more, but comes disabled by default (this is supposed to be remedied in a later firmware update).

Battery:

The battery life is not a big selling point for this phone. On my phone, I generally can keep it running for about 1 - 1.5 days before it needs a recharge. While this is lower than the average, I have my phone utilizing the Exchange Push Mail from work (the phone keeps a data connection constantly active to receive mail instantly from work). I also have my phone check a POP3 mail account every 15 minutes. That’s on top of occasional web browsing and phone calls.

The charger for the phone still uses Palm’s proprietary connection for charging, which is small and seems easy to break. It’d be a lot nicer if they used a USB connection.

Noted Bugs:

The phone has it’s fair share of bugs. One of the biggest and (unfortunately) most common bugs is the quiet ringer. If the Voice Command is enabled (note that Voice Command will enable itself without you asking sometimes), sometimes the ringer and vibrate function go quiet. This means if you get an incoming call, the phone will not ring and the vibrate function will not vibrate. You’ll just get a missed call notification the next time you look at your phone. Cingular at&t wireless has acknowledged this, but they haven’t released a fix for it yet (since January, when the phone launched).

Another bug is the alarm. It seems that if the phone is on standby, the alarm clock will not work. And since the only time your phone is not on standby is when you’re using it, the alarm clock is pretty worthless.

Cosmetics:

The phone’s style is great, but there’s a horrible cosmetic issue that happens to many users of the 750 (including me). Despite taking excellent care of the device, it seems small (almost hairline) cracks or fractures occur around the two soft buttons above the talk/end call buttons. Many people have alerted Cingular at&t wireless about this, but they refuse to acknowledge it as a problem and instead blame the user for not taking care of the device.

Conclusion:

Despite it’s faults, it’s an excellent phone. It combines the amazing hardware of a Palm with the powerful Windows Mobile software–quite possibly the best combination of hardware and software yet. Palm has promised an update to Windows Mobile 6 sometime this year, which will add the HSDPA support and (hopefully) fix a lot of the bugs that this phone suffers from.

Once you go smartphone, you’ll never go back.

~Jaker