Palm Treo 650: (Possibly) The Ultimate Cellphone; A Treo Look Four Years Later

Almost four years ago I reviewed a cellphone called the Handspring Treo 300, and I called it “The Ultimate (2002) Cellphone”. This device was widely accepted by many as the standard against which to judge phones that integrated cellular telephones and PDAs (Personal Data Assistants). That Treo 300 “smartphone,” as they are now called, has now evolved into the Treo 650, with the Palm operating system, and even into the new Treo 700 with a Microsoft Windows operating system.

I used the Sprint-powered Treo 300 with success for 2 years, but then I moved to an area where Sprint had no service. As I wrote in my first review, “Sprint telephoning is pretty cool, but there is one drawback. In the good old USA, Sprint only covers metropolitan areas. That means if you are traveling in a lot of rural areas you will get hit with high-blood-pressure roaming charges if you try to use a Sprintphone. Maybe some day Sprint will cover all the calling areas but for now you have to be a big-city person to make it worthwhile. You're out of luck otherwise. But if you are in Sprint Country, the Handspring Treo 300 is the best thing around, in my opinion.”

Well, as it happened, my new town to work in was 10 miles outside the Sprint digital network (it still is), so I had to go back with an analog service which was very mediocre and made me long for the good old Treo days. Then a few months later I moved to another town outside the Sprint network, and having gotten the Treo “bug” I wondered if I could reunite with my favorite phone. The prevailing service there was Cellular One, and in that venue they did not support the Treo. Enter 2006, and Alltel merges with Cellular One. Voila! The Palm Treo 650 becomes available!

In some ways I wish I could have had the new Treo 700 with Windows to check out in this zone, but so far Alltel doesn’t offer it here. I have also heard that it is not as fast as the 650 and its screen resolution is inferior. Even so, its Windows-type PDA applications are bound to be much more seamless for Windows computer users than the “adapter” versions that go from the Palm OS to Windows, so if you are (a) PDA intensive and (b) a die-hard Microsoft person, the 700 is probably your way to go. As for me, I had to go with the Treo 650, but that’s probably the way I would gave gone anyway.

I like to have the ability to do MS Word, Excell, and a few other PDA apps in the PDA mode on the smartphone, but the conversion program has always served my needs well enough. I don’t use Outlook (eyes are rolling, I’m sure) for my email; just plain little populist Hotmail. And I love all the myriad of Palm Operating system software applications that every Tom, Dick, and Harriet have created for everything from shopping for used car parts to choosing your favorite cheese. The Palm applications are by far the most numerous and varied in the PDA world, a sort of Whole-Earth Catalogue of different kinds of programs. The only drawback they have in conjunction with the Treo 650 is that many of them are outdated now and will lock up with the new high-speed Treo 650 Palm OS. But many of them work like a charm, and you won’t find the same thing is true in the Windows world, even though the Windows PDA developers have done a great job. I am biased, of course, but to me the Palm Treo 650 is head and shoulders above the rest of the smartphones around today like the Ipod is to other Mp3 players. It does the job, sure, but there is that little something extra; a little bit of soul. That’s my right-brain evaluation, now let’s look at the technical side.

It has all the advantages I noted four years ago about the Treo 300: “It is EXTREMELY intuitive and user-friendly. You can dial your phone numbers three ways, for example, however you wish. You get 50 speed dials with NAMES so you don't have to memorize code-numbers ("Let's see, Aunt Hildagarde is number 13, right? Or is that cousin Heidi?") and as if that isn't enough, the real gold-mine is this: You can put thousands of names, addresses, and phone numbers in the address book, and a simple tap of the stylus on any of those numbers will RING UP THE PERSON'S NUMBER. In essence, you have a speed dialer that will ring 10,000 or more numbers and the names are with them so there's no memorizing. Amazing.”

Of course, the Treo 650 now has a high-resolution picture to go with each person or business you call. This is great for those of us who have trouble remembering names and faces of lots and lots of people (I’m sure that you probably never have that problem, right?) The image quality of these pictures is much improved over that of four years ago (although the images seem a tad bit smaller,) plus when your phone rings, and your caller I.D. works, you get to actually see the face of who is calling you, which is faster for the brain than the “old-fashioned way” of having to actually read the caller I.D. name of the person in text (how 2005!) This is all presuming that you have previously embedded images into the entries in your address book, a time consuming but fairly user-friendly process, assuming you can access digital images of your associates and friends (think scanner…and other resources.)

Back to some basics I noted before: “Now the reason it is called the TREO is because it really encompasses a "Trio" (Three; 3) of main feature areas.” In my earlier review I noted that you get (a) a telephone, (b) a PDA, and (c) an internet access device. But now there is more: it functions as a great Mp3 player with or without earphones (if you don’t mind soft pillow-side music.) And with its new ability to use SD cards (1,2 Gb or more?) (and an improvement I recommended in my 2004 review) the (improved) camera can now take and store gazillions of pictures and you even have a workable little movie camera capability. So now instead of triple functions it has six functions. Instead of calling it the Treo 650, maybe they should call it the “Sex 650.” Marketing and advertising departments: take note.

In the telephone (cellphone) part, a few things are better. The biggie is that the sound on this phone is incredible compared to my previous two analog bottom-of-the-line phones, both even so made by excellent companies (Motorola and LG). The Treo 650’s phone sound is like driving a Porshe compared to Detroit iron; it rocks. The speakerphone is great too, especially when you are in a situation such as in your car (parked on the side of the road, of course.) One wish I wish it had was voice-recog software, because I liked having my LG phone simply answer my vocal requests, even in its robotic voice, but I’m sure that will come. But the three-way (manual) dialing ability on the 650 is still amazing.

I still love “Feature area Two”, the PDA part. The Treo has a navigator button and 4 side buttons midway down from its high-res color screen. Click one and you get your phone-dialer/address book. Click two and you get the calendar (and a wonder-filled calendar it is!) Click three and you get the internet (more about that in a minute). Click four and you get a gazillion memo features.

You can also re-program these buttons. For example, in my case, for now I am not using the internet features on the smartphone very much; I simply am spoiled by using the web on my laptop with broadband and wi-fi. The internet features do work better than four years ago, but who wants to surf the web- unless it is an emergency or I was a biz-guy and needed all that Blackberry-type stuff- when a modern laptop will be much more satisfying? But I digress- I am sure that the internet stuff on the 650 for some is the Big Draw, and more power to them. Me, I like the phone, the PDA, and the camera stuff the best, so I reset button number three for the camera. Hey, I’m a visual person- what can I say?

In the PDA part, you can click into a new world unfolding, and you get all the applications you need. The new unit holds 23 MB of RAM, compared to the earlier TREO 300’s 16 MB, so you can put documents, memos, databases, pictures, games (!) books, and other things in there- it’s like a closet full of fun. Many people put in a WORD and maybe EXCEL adapter which sync up with the WORD and EXCEL, etc. on their desktop computers. You can download/upload WORD documents and other stuff fairly easily, although not as easily, I’m sure as on the 700. So if you are into amazing applications, there you have it.

I must confess, though, that I went through a transformation that I suspect most other people go through with their smartphones and PDAs as well. When I first used the Treo 300, I was so elated with all it would do that I bought and tried many, many different application programs- many of which I also later used in my Palm Zire 72 PDA. But after a few years you get comfortable with a handful you like, and you tend to stick with them. Now that I have the Treo 650, I basically use only half-a-dozen apps on a regular basis. But the ones I use a lot are almost indispensable now.

A gripe, but one I don’t know how to fix: the keyboard shrunk from the old 300’s size and my big fingers have a hard time on the 650’s tiny buttons. But this is a compromise; I love the smaller size of the 650, even without the flip-cover (which I loved,) and so we get downsizing but the “typing” is best done on a computer and hot-synched into the 650. Which brings me to another upper: typing stuff into a computer and transferring it via hotsync to the 650.

I love the computer software for, say, the address/phone book that comes with the 650! It looks the same as that of the 300, but for some reason it seems a hundred percent more intuitive and faster. And less buggy. Data entry is a breeze compared to even four years ago. Granted, it may be the newer computers with their improved processors and OSs that should get the credit, but it seemed like what took me weeks a few years ago has only taken me a few days with the new stuff. Secretaries are gonna love it.

Area three, the internet area, I’ve already mentioned. In terms of browsing, you can get probably 80% of the same effect, plus email. Text messaging is great, too, if you do that (I don’t…I’d rather hear that voice, thank you.) So you got your web…if you want it here rather than on your larger computer. Not me…at least not most of the time.

The hotsync hardware/software works much better than on the Treo 300. Back then in 2002 you got a small tangle of wires that went all over the place, it seems like. Now you get one wire, straight from the phone plug to the USB port with a convenient “on” button in the middle, and it seems like the sync process is far faster and less buggy. The hero, again, may actually be today’s processors and/or OSs, and/or overall computer improvements, but whatever it is, I like.

I find that, prior to synching, If I remove the SD card, things run a lot faster. I don’t know if the synching software feels like it has to go exploring all over the 2 Gb map of my SD card or what, but a hot-sync sans the SD card is a lot more efficient. Or so it seems.

In the earlier review, I wrote, “As you might imagine, the Treo is quite addictive. A few years ago Bill Gates wrote a book called THE ROAD AHEAD in which he predicted that some day we would carry around a wallet-sized device that would be a phone, an emailer, an instant messenger, a web surfer, a virtual picture album, and a PDA, etc. The Treo is probably the best unit today which goes into the mode of fulfilling Bill's prophecy of such a device. I predict that the Treo is going to set the standard for cellphones and PDAs in the years to come.”

Has my prophecy come true? In many ways, yes. Actually, most cellphones are not smartphones at all; they don’t have to be. They just link people and provide them with fuzzy digital photographs. But the Treo has indeed become the Big Dog in the world of smartphones, and its acceptance now into the Windows platform seems to validate that.

Here is a list of the features that the Treo 300 had, compared with the Treo 650.

" Cell Phone (Excellent Tone) W/ Cradle Charger & Microphone/Earphone cord.” Check. Although you don’t get a cradle any more; just a cord.

"HUGE electronic Address Book w/ speed dial” Check. Greatly improved camera and imagery.

"Calendar w/ audible prompts” Check.

"Internet Connection: News Weather” Check.

"HUGE and intuitive Memo pad” Check.

"Phone Message checker” Check.

"To-Do List w/ prioritization” Check.

"Calculator” Check.

"City Time Time Zone Checker” Check.

"Photo Album” Check. And add in the capability of the SD expansion card and you have a real new world of taking all your photos with you. You can use the 650’s good little 2X zoom camera, but I like to use the images from my 5MP camera which I simply transfer to the SD expansion card and view on the phone. They load slow, but they look great on the Treo’s screen.

"Encryption Capability” Check. It’s nice to lock down the phone each time, especially if your PDA has state secrets on it, like where Uncle Billy keeps the macadamia nuts.

"Backup Capability w/ Computer” Check.

"Replacement Insurance” Check.

"Shopping List Maker w/ Lists” Check. This older piece of software works with the new Palm OS.

"Databases Listing Program” Check. So does this one. Great for listing your DVDs, etc.

"Word Processing Program that syncs w/ MS WORD” Check.

"Street Maps Program” Check.

"Games Capability (Chess, Solitaire, Poker, etc.)” Check.

Plus the battery is good.

NEW STUFF:

• The Mp3 Player. With and without earphones.
• The Video Recorder
• Bluetooth Wireless Technology
• Backlit QWERTY Keyboard
• Powerpoint
• The SD Expansion card
• Storage increased from 16 MB to 23 MB
• The faster Intel processor

With the earlier Treo, I asked for the following improvements:

“* I would make the case out of metal instead of plastic. METAL is a lot more durable, doesn't get scratched up if you drop it (as easy as plastic), would not add all that much to the price, and it would look nicer over the long haul. “ We’re still in plastic-land, although the 650’s case is a lot sexier.

”* I would make the ringer louder. It is a little TOO quiet, even on full volume, in the noisy places where a lot of us live and work.” They did this and got it right. Plus I like some of the new ringtones, especially those with slow jazz in them.

”* I would make it easier to get to email. Getting to the Internet is not real hard, but getting to your email is a serpentine process in alchemaic webology if there ever was one.“ This is still a bit ultra-techy, but getting better.

”* I would give the customer/enduser a MUCH better instruction manual. The one that comes with the Treo 300 (at least from SPRINT) is extremely light and fluffy, almost like a promo manual. Lots of questions go unanswered and lots of tips are missing. For all the bucks the customer is shelling out, they should a decent manual and a support number. Tell us not only about the phone section, but all the ins and outs of the PDA section and the Internet section. Don't pass the buck on off to some web site for the customer to go to; give it to the serious money customer in hard copy at the time of the initial purchase. It's good, but it'll be mo betta that way.”My manual from Alltel is still way too skimpy, but I hear that other carriers give you more than you want to know. My best advice? Get a third-party “For Dummies”- type manual and study that.

”* I would add the capability for memory expansion cards. The 16 MB memory is nice, but it would be good to be able to do all the things you can do with additional interchangable memory.” Hey!!!!!! They listened to us and got that one right!!!!

As I said back then, this is expensive, it requires a learning curve, and you’re gonna want to not lose it. But the Treo 650 may well become an indispensable part of your life. By day you can use it for all your business and social contacts, and by night you can put it by your bedside and have it play “Moonlight Serenade” or "In The Mood" or "Red Neutrino Valley Dropoff Blues" or whatever for you. And in between it will help you do your shopping, find your way, surf the web, do messaging, and show you all your pictures. It is a top-seller today all around the world and most critics love it.

Stick around for my review of the “Treo 1000” in a few years. Let’s see what comes next...on "The Road Ahead!"