Palm Treo 500v

Features

Ease-of-use is the name of the game for Palm. This is a company that has excelled in making PDA-phones simple for the masses, as evidenced by the Treo 650 and then the WM Treo 750 later on. With the 750, Palm addressed some common issues users had with the WM interface. For example, users can dial directly from the Today screen on that device and search for contacts with fewer button presses.

The thing with WM6 standard, the version meant for non-touchscreen smart phones, is that it is already very user-friendly to begin with. It was designed by Microsoft for use with a numeric keypad, and even without any customization, dialing and searching for contacts is a breeze--a user need only begin typing in the first few letters of a contact to find it from the home screen, whether using a numeric or QWERTY keypad.

Since that's taken care of, Palm has seen fit to make its menu easier to use with its own carousel interface. Pressing Start from the home screen calls up the category tabs which can be scrolled through from left to right. Tabs include recent programs, a message center, quick contacts and access to essential settings like profile, ringtones and keylock. You can even assign numbers to favorite contacts so that pressing and holding that number will start a call, a feature brought over from the other Treos.

We have to agree that this is certainly more convenient than the vanilla WM6 standard interface, but it is not new. Samsung has something similar in the i600, which it dubs as the card wheel interface. While not all the features are identical, Palm is certainly not the first in this space.

The most glaring omission, we felt, is threaded text messaging. First found on the Palm OS Treos, this feature was then ported over to the WM Treo 750. WM enthusiasts have even ripped out this feature and put it in other devices. Though that's not a practice we applaud, seeing that Palm meant it only for its own PDA-phones, it shows how popular this feature is. We know a legion of Apple fanboys will flame us for calling it a copycat feature, but threaded messaging is also found on the iPhone. So we cannot fathom why this was left out of the 500v.

A Palm spokesperson told us the company wanted to concentrate on the interface, and being a consumer-oriented device, that was the focus, not threaded messaging. To that, we say why not just set the bar higher? This is a feature we are sure the mainstream consumer will enjoy very much, and it would have differentiated the 500v from other WM6 smart phones.

Connectivity-wise, the 500v is equipped with a 3G radio, but not HSDPA. It also does not have Wi-Fi, which means Web surfing and email will all have to be done using the cellular network.

This smart phone comes with 256MB of internal flash memory, of which 150MB is available to the user. For those who use it as a video and music player, it also has a microSD card slot for memory expansion. Note that this slot is found below the battery, which means you need to turn off the device everytime you want to switch cards or copy files onto it when using a card reader.

Found on the back of the 500v is a 2-megapixel camera. As far as phone cameras go, this one takes decent images, though we would have liked if it had autofocus and an LED flash. There is no front camera for video calls.

By virtue of its WM6 OS, the 500v will come with Windows Live integration, support for multiple email accounts, the Internet Explorer browser and Office Mobile for opening and editing documents.

« Design | Performance and Conclusion »

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