Palm Treo 700p

One big enhancement and a ton of smaller ones allow the Treo 700p to retain its title as the best smart phone. It’s still on the bulky side, and it costs $200 more than the much slimmer Motorola Q, but power users who demand EV-DO speeds along with simple operation can’t go wrong with this device.

 

The 6.4-ounce Treo 700p looks and feels a lot like the 650, but there are several subtle design differences, some welcome, some not. The deivce has dedicated send and end keys for making and terminating calls; the bad news for Treo fans is that the Menu key has been moved from its position next to the five-way navigation control to the bottom right of the keyboard, which is a little less convenient.

 

The 700p still sports an excellent keyboard, the aforementioned five-way control for the easiest one-handed navigation on any smart phone, and the convenient ringer switch (which vibrates to let you know when you’ve entered Silent mode.) There’s still a stylus for those times when you tap on the 320 x 320-pixel display to select text or edit documents, but you’ll rarely need it. On the left side of the device you’ll find a button beneath the volume controls that you can set to launch a new Voice Memo function.

 

While the 700p is powered by the same 312-MHz Intel XScale processor, Palm has upped the amount of user-available memory from 23MB to 60MB, which allows users to store more applications on the device instead of an easily lost memory card. A new 1.3-MP camera takes sharper shots than the Treo 650’s VGA cam, and you can now share your pics without having to leave the Camera application, as well as save a photo to a contact directly from an album.

The biggest leap for the 700p is its support for EV-DO, Sprint’s high-speed network that blankets most major metro areas in the U.S. In our tests we saw very good average throughput of 500 Kbps. When we compared the Treo 650 and 700p side by side, the 700p took 1 minute to download the entire New York Times homepage (including images), while the 650 took 2 minutes and 16 seconds. That’s a huge but somewhat deceiving gap because the Blazer browser on both devices starts rendering text immediately, so you can usually find what you’re looking for on a site before the entire page loads.

 

EV-DO support enables a few other nifty tricks, including the ability to answer a call or ignore it with a quick text message during a data session. The Blazer browser is now technically capable of streaming video, but we found this feature to be hit or miss (mostly miss) since the 700p doesn’t support Flash, which many Web sites now use. If you’re looking for a video fix, you’re better off checking out Sprint TV, the first smart phone to support this service. Watching ABC News Now, we could easily make out Sam Donaldson’s face (for better or for worse), but the audio was rarely in sync with the video.

 

We enjoyed listening to the Sirius Hits radio channel, also found within the Sprint TV menu, but there were occasional dropouts. If you want to load your own MP3s onto a memory card, Palm includes the Pocket Tunes player. Too bad you can’t play WMAs or take advantage of music subscription services out of the box; for that you’ll need to upgrade to Pocket Tunes Deluxe ($24.95). Unlike other Power Vision phones, the 700p doesn’t support the Sprint Music Store for over-the-air downloads.

 

Even though you can surf any site, Sprint’s On Demand service is a welcome feature on the 700p, offering quick links to breaking news, sports scores, weather forecasts, and more. You can also get detailed maps and directions, as well as look up businesses or people using the On Demand directory. We love the intuitive interface with easy-to-read icons.

 

Road warriors will appreciate the ability to use the Treo 700p as a modem for their notebook, either via a USB cable connection or Bluetooth dial-up networking. But they will need to sign up for a Phone as Modem Plan ($39.99 per month for 40MB, $49.99 per month for unlimited data, or $39.99 per month for unlimited data with a two-year voice plan).

 

On the e-mail front, the new VersaMail 3.5 client has improved functionality, including support for Exchange Server 2003, Smart Addressing (it remembers recently used e-mail addresses), faster scrolling, and a Sort button on the main inbox page. Most important, VersaMail is more stable than the previous version, which tended to reset the Treo 650 randomly. Attachment support now includes PDF files, in addition to the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files that the included copy of Documents to Go 8.0 handles.

 

During our two-week test period, the voice quality of the Treo 700p was only mildly better than the Treo 650, with some fuzziness on our end of the line but generally good reception. Battery life is still stellar; you can take your Treo home for the weekend and leave the charger at work.

 

While not as affordable or sexy as the Motorola Q, the Treo 700p is faster, more versatile, and easier to use. It’s well worth the splurge.