I love my quirky little Palm Treo 700w!

It's rare that a device changes your habits. I've avoided the whole iPod craze as I see anything with an Apple logo on it as being branded by Satan. But when I read articles about the Palm Treo 700w I decided to stop by the Verizon store and check one out.

I left that store with a brand new phone (and a lot less cash). I was thoroughly impressed by the beautiful display, the great build quality and the solid feel of the phone and it's buttons. Having had a Blackberry thrust upon me for about 5 months recently, I was quite suspicious of whether or not anyone could make a PDA/phone combination that didn't require you to develop new joints in your arm to hold it correctly so that you can hear, but the good folks at Palm designed a Phone first, and a PDA second and it works very, very well that way.

Microsoft deserves some credit, too. The Palm Treo 700w comes with Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphone installed. You get Mobile Word, Mobile Excel, Mobile Powerpoint and Mobile Outlook as part of the package. You also get Windows Media Player for Smartphones; more on that later.

As a phone
The phone has a big thick antennae sticking out of the top left, and it works pretty well. Amazingly, the phone can receive calls in buildings that many normal phones cannot. It gets great reception at speed and is a real credit to this class of device.

One complaint about the phone, though: Windows Mobile is still learning how to be a cellphone, and sometimes its PDAish features get in the way of just being a phone. If you are in an application and want to place a call, you have to hit the Windows button, scroll to "Today", click the center pad button, and then you can start dialing your number. A hot botton would be a whole lot better, especially if it took you straight to the dial-pad screen where you can see all the letters that go with numbers.

The phone is also a PDA, and as such it's very adept at logging calls and keeping up with your contacts. It even has the ability to take notes during a call and organizes such notes by the call information. Sweet! If you take a lot of notes while talking, you'll definately want to get a bluetooth headset to use with this thing so you can type and talk at the same time.

As a tool
Verizon was offering $100 off the phone if I took the $45 per month unlimited internet access. Again, SWEET. The internet services is not fast (think 14.4k most of the time), but it's extremely useful and works seamlessly. One of the biggest advantages of this device is that Outlook is built in and Microsoft has been smart enough to make the newest versions of Outlook Web Access compatible with Windows Mobile 5.0. That's a big, big plus for people with corporate email accounts. You no longer have to open a web browser to check your mail through OWA if you have access to the Internet. And unlike the browser based version of OWA, your PDA is persistent and you can view your email even when you have no internet connection!

The versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint that ship are functional, but not feature rich. Especially Excel is lacking many of the UI features that make Excel stand out head and shoulders above its competition on a desktop PC. But in this form factor the screen is just too limited to use it seriously with Excel. Not that Excel is useless, mind you. It's still great at data entry and since it saves to real Excel workbooks, you can sync your sheets to a PC with Excel 2003 and purty-up your data for printing or distribution.

Word is great for reading existing documents, but I wouldn't try to type War and Peace in there. Powerpoint, on the other hand seems completely natural (if a tad small) on this device.

Also included is Internet Explorer. Several website think it's IE 4, which precludes it from visiting some sites. This version of IE has a neat feature that turns any page into a single column of text, which almost completely eliminates side-to-side scrolling. You can also sync your favorites to and from your pc.

Speaking of syncing with a PC, this is my number one gripe about Windows Mobile (and not just this phone). Someone at Microsoft is smoking something really strong in the ActiveSync team. This thing is garbage. If I sync to my laptop and then my home PC, the next time I sync with my laptop I have to delete my old laptop sync profile and create a new one. This is freaking insane!!!!

As a media player
Windows Media Player 10 has the really cool feature of detecting Windows Mobile 5.0 media players and building and pushing music lists to them. I've never used iTunes, but I can't imagine it being any easier.

A long time ago I had a very early Windows CE 2.1 device from Casio. The sound quality from that thing was horrible. So when I got my Treo I wasn't expecting a hi-fi experience. I WAS WRONG. Wow, this thing sounds great when hooked up to a decent audio amplifier. My pickup truck has an auxiallary input on the dash and the first time I plugged in the Treo I was absolutely blown away by how clear and strong the sound was that comes from this little beast.

Accessories
The Palm Treo 700w comes with a wall charger and USB docking cable and that's about it. So far I've purchased a 512MB SD card for my music, an SD-Wifi Card from Palm and a Palm Treo 650/700 docking station. The 512MB SD card and docking station were both great buys. The SD-Wifi Card sucks royally. It emits a lot of interference which practically kills any hope of using the phone when the card is plugged in. Additionally, it's only 802.11b and not even very good at that. I truly wish I hadn't bought this little blue piece of plastic. Honestly, don't get it. Spend the money to get the unlimited internet package and wait until Palm (or someone) comes out with a decent 802.11g Wi-Fi card for this thing.

Conclusion
Ok, so I started this off by saying this phone has changed my habits. It has! I now have it with me (or within earshot) all the time. I love it as my phone. I love it as my list taker. I love it as my note taker. I love it as my MP3 player. Would I change anything? Yes, if I could have Microsoft fix one thing it would be some way to assign a hot bottun to different programs and to different functions such as the dial pad. I would also make the screen use a higher density LCD so that 640x480 could be displayed on the phone. Oh, and the camera sucks, but that's practically to be expected... it is a phone.