Best smartphone ever!

Having a long background as a Palm business user and gadget fanatic I’ve now given my Treo 650 (GSM) a thorough real-life test for three weeks and I must say it’s a killer gadget worthy of comparison to the Palm V revolution.

Phone
The first thing I look at when reviewing a smartphone is how well it works as a phone, this is where most pda-manufacturers fail. If you’re really going to use it as a phone the voice quality, reception, battery life and usability really have to work well.

The 650 passes this test, the voice quality, reception and battery life are good enough.

The phone-PDA-integration is ok. You can of course call people in your phone book, you can assign speed-dial numbers and buttons, the caller ID is looked up in the phone book, the call lists work well etc. And of course since it’s Palm based none of this is annoyingly slow as when using Win CE or Symbian based devices. I found it ok to dial numbers using the keypad. There is also on on-screen dial pad but it has some annoying bugs making it impossible to edit a pasted-in number before you dial, for example when you found a phone number without a country code in an email.

There is a genius manual switch to mute the device, this is a lot better than the profile software settings that most phones have. There are bugs in the sound settings though. It can ignore setting the system sound level to zero, beeping anyway when tapping and worse, occasionally the whole system goes silent after switching on the sound with the manual switch. I can live with that personally since it still vibrates in my pocket on incoming phone calls for example.

I use a Logitech Bluetooth headset and it works perfectly.

The 650 is quadband but I’ve only used it in Sweden so far.

Email and SMS
Perhaps the biggest advantage of having a smartphone is a unified address book. With the good PC synchronization a Palm PDA offers, you can now get away with maintaining just one address book for email addresses, phone numbers for calling and mobile phone numbers for sending SMS messages. And unlike mobile phones you can actually type in shorter emails, not just read email.

The Treo 650 does this well. It comes with VersaMail and I found it working nicely, going out and popping email over GPRS every once in a while (you can set up scheduled gets on a per-account basis). RIM are still the only ones with push email although Vodafone may change that later this year.

Input
For navigation/selection you have the choice between a pen and a joystick. The applications are the same as before and they were build for using the pen. This can make it quite tedious to do some things using the joystick, for example creating a new appointment in the calendar.

They’ve done away with Grafitti on this model so all typing has to be done using the keyboard. I found it quite fast thumbing away on it, faster than using Grafitti 2 for sure. As always there isn’t anything facilitating internationalization when it comes to input – as a Swedish user I miss our three extra letters, the only way to bring them up is to scroll through a list of “alternative” characters including characters from various languages. While this could of course be improved with third party software as has been done in the past for Grafitti extensions there is nothing that will fully replace a complete physical keypad.

Screen
The screen is a pretty good touchscreen. I don’t think I’ll be popping in my digicam’s SD card to view pictures on the 650 screen they way I did on my T3, the screen is simply physically too small for that. For regular PIM applications I find it’s large enough.

System
The 650 is based on a hybrid Palm OS, this is a transition phase to the next major version. If you’re not a techie planning to program this thing that doesn’t matter much. The system is quite stable, I’ve only had to pull the battery once in three weeks. I expect there will be system updates released should it turn out to have some major instability.

Synchronization
For some reason they have chosen to supply the PalmOne synchronization software on the CD instead of Chapura’s. Although it works I found this to be a drawback since I cross-sync to computers both at home and at work and that simply didn’t work even in my basic tests.

Cross-synchronization is of course a challenge for the engineers. If you reinstall one of your PC:s the change history goes away and after that you’re bound to live with the duplicates popping up at every synch forever after. Trust me, I’ve been there. I am now a happy user of KeySuite, amonst other things it allows you to synch your work related stuff to your work PC and your personal related stuff to your home PC.

Synchronizing over Bluetooth has been a painless experience. I have honestly never used the data cable for the 650 (or for the T3 for that matter), that’s how solid it is.

Software extras
Apart from the software mentioned above there isn’t much else supplied. The calculator is the super basic one, at least there’s a world-time app.

mp3
The Real mp3 player is the same one that was shipped with my old T3. While quite basic it’s ok for smaller music collections which is all you’ll fit on an SD card anyway. Unlike the T3 I actually use the mp3 player on this device, I think mostly because it has physical pause and volume buttons, making it almost as useful as a standalone mp3 player. The Real player will only play music from an SD card, but that’s fine since there isn’t much room for many songs on the internal memory and you probably don’t want to synch all that data anyway.

For some reason mp3 gadgets still don’t support support streaming Bluetooth audio and the 650 is no exception, so you have to use regular wired headphones (with a small plug).

Camera
The camera is your average 2004 standard cellphone camera, i.e. it won’t replace a real digicam in any way.

About the author
I would describe myself as an avid Palm user, managing both my personal and business life with Palm devices since 1996. Apart from a short flirt with an iPaq and a Symbian smartphone in 2002 it’s been all Palm from day one: the list includes the Palm Pilot, Palm 5000, Palm V, Visor, Visor Deluxe, Visor Prism with SoundsGood mp3 Springboard, Treo 270g, Palm T3 and now the Treo 650.