Palm Treo 700w

Features
The feature that sets the Palm Treo 700w apart from the rest of the Treo family is obviously its Windows Mobile 5 operating system. With it, you get the new Microsoft Office Mobile Suite, including Word Mobile, Excel Mobile, and PowerPoint Mobile. The first two apps add support for charts and tables--an enhancement to previous versions--while the latter is completely new. Although you can't edit slides in this version of PowerPoint, it's nice to be able to view presentations right on your device. The biggest draw for many, however, will be Outlook Mobile. The Treo 700w will be upgradable to Microsoft's Messaging and Security Feature Pack, which includes support for push e-mail. Now, you can receive Outlook e-mail in real time (along with POP3 and IMAP4 accounts, including Hotmail and Yahoo), appointments, contacts, and tasks directly on your device via a connection with Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync. The Treo 700w's complementary support for Verizon's EV-DO network sweetens the deal, as it means faster download speeds of around 400Kbps to 700Kbps. Other wireless options include Bluetooth for hands-free calling (there's also a speakerphone) but unfortunately no Wi-Fi, and you can't use the device as a wireless modem for your laptop when you are on the road. Palm says the Treo 700w will support its Wi-Fi card, so you can gain access that way.

Also unique to the Treo 700w is the customizable Today screen, which provides convenient and quick access to widely used apps. For example, you can now dial by name just by entering the first couple of letters of a contact, rather than having to dig through your whole address book. You can also easily surf the Net by entering text in the Web search field at the bottom of the Today screen, and Internet Explorer Mobile kicks in.

In addition, the Palm Treo 700w includes some new phone features that should make mobile professionals smile. First, say you're in a meeting and an important call comes through, but you can't get to it. The Treo 700w lets you reply with a text message to let callers know you received the call but were otherwise engaged. We checked out this text function, and it worked wonderfully. The Treo 700w also supports photo speed dial, which you can quickly access from the Today screen, and lets you call contacts by photos, as well as a user-friendly, icon-based voicemail app that supports numerous systems at work or home. While we love these added phone capabilities, we should also note that you can now enjoy these same features on the Treo 650, thanks to third-party developers. An app called SharkMsg by Ludus Technologies can perform the same "ignore with SMS" duties of the Windows Treo, and Electric Pocket has developed a program called PhotoDial that allows for photo speed dial.

All that said, we have to give the advantage of one-handed operation to the Treo 700w. With the combination of the useful shortcut keys and the Today screen, we could perform most operations without having to break out the stylus--truly convenient for working on the go.

For entertainment, the Palm Treo 700w includes Windows Media Player 10 Mobile, so you can listen to music and watch videos, plus it supports WMA, WMV, and MP3 files, among others. Also, for extra kicks, you can now assign any supported video file as a ring tone. If you want to take photos of your own, the Treo 700w comes equipped with a 1.3-megapixel camera, an improvement upon the Treo 650's VGA camera. There's a 2X zoom, and you can choose from three quality settings (High, Normal, and Low) and five resolutions (1,280x1,024, 640x480, 320x240, 240x180, and 160x120). You can also adjust the brightness, and once you've snapped your image, you can rotate it or crop it to your liking. Image quality was decent but definitely not printworthy. In video mode, you get two quality settings (176x144 and 352x288) and brightness controls. Plus, you can choose to limit video clips to 15 seconds, 30 seconds, or none at all. Once you're done, you can assign your masterpieces as wallpaper or photo caller ID, or you can save them to the phone's internal memory. There's 128MB of memory (60MB is user accessible) onboard, but thanks to the SDIO/MMC expansion slot, you can load a nice memory card with such multimedia content and save the internal memory for other apps.

Performance
We tested the dual-band (CDMA 800/1900; EV-DO) Palm Treo 700w in Las Vegas and the San Francisco area using Verizon's network, and call quality was excellent. Conversations were loud and clear on our end, and our callers reported the same. Speakerphone quality was a mixed bag. While everything was fine on our end, callers said we sounded far away. We had no problems pairing the Treo 700w with the Logitech Mobile Traveller Bluetooth headset, although call quality diminished slightly. Powered by a 312MHz Intel XScale processor and EV-DO support, the Treo 700w had no problems surfing the Web, and load times were fast.

The Palm Treo 700w's battery is rated for a talk time of 4.7 hours and a standby time of 15 days, which is decent for a phone. In CNET Labs' tests, we met the rated talk time, but standby time fell short by about 5 days. According to FCC radiation tests, the Treo 700w has a digital SAR rating of 1.26 watts per kilogram.

• Most Popular

• Upcoming

What's Hot