Treo 600: Decent Smartphone with Serious Some System Problems
Written: Nov 06 '05 (Updated Nov 06 '05)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Palm organizer and phone.
Cons: Some serious system problems, terrible camera, lackluster reception.
The Bottom Line: Purchase only if you can deal with some serious system issues. Decent smartphone.
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| mookiekong's Full Review: Palm Treo 600 Smartphone |
I have always been a Palm OS user (started with the 128kb Palm). I love the OS and think that it is still a viable OS for handhelds – especially when compared with WinCE (aka PocketPC or Windows Mobile or whatever Microsoft is calling it these days). Symbian is also a good mobile OS, but since I am a long time Palm user, the Treo 600 really intrigued me. Here’s my review of the device, your mileage may vary if you are a Microsoft of Symbian fan.
When I was looking for a smartphone, I was looking for some specific attributes. First, I wanted a keyboard, small as it maybe; a keyboard on a smartphone is a must because I don’t want to be dealing with predictive text. Second, I needed the smartphone to synchronize nicely with my Powerbook. I did not want to be relying on synchronization with a remote server – much like how the Danger Sidekick II worked, because when the backend server goes down or when I want to leave the service, I want to take my info with me. And lastly, I was looking for expandability of storage.
Hardware
The Treo 600 has a decent 160x160 resolution screen. It is not the brightest or highest resolution screen out there, but it does its job. If you want a higher resolution screen, then the Treo 600's big brother, the Treo 650 is the machine for you. The screen on the Treo 600 handles all the applications just fine and for day-to-day use, it works well. If you are paranoid about PDA screens, then put a protective layer on the screen because as much as I used the five-way pad, I still had to use the touch-screen sometimes.
The Treo 600 is a large phone by all means. The body of the phone is more fat and thick than anything, but to make it even larger is the antenna that is the size of a small thumb. The weight of the Treo 600 is also a bit on the heavy side, but this is a smartphone, not some designer phone like the Motorola RAZR V3. I wish that Handspring and Palm could have found a way to get rid of the antenna; I mean looking at the phones from Nokia, Samsung and Motorola there has got to be a way to integrate that big stubby antenna into the phone.
The body of the Treo 600 is made of all plastic and is the kind of plastic that keeps finger grease, you know the kind that comes from daily use of the phone. After a day of use, I had to give the Treo a good wipe to keep it from getting slippery. There are some phones that come with the textured plastic which resists this type of slipperiness, but Handspring and Palm chose not to use that type of plastic, which is unfortunate.
The front of the Treo 600 has the screen, a five-way control pad, the keyboard and four application buttons. The nice thing about the application buttons is that they have dual functions – one from pushing the button directly and another when pushing the button while holding the “blue” button. This is great since I can access a few applications without having to visit the launcher – for instance the phone button also accesses the web, the text message button also accesses email, and the calendar button also accesses the memo pad. The other thing is that you’ll notice that down the middle is the normal phone pad, complete with raised number 5 in the middle. This makes for easy dialing from the face buttons. The only thing is that if you have to dial-by-letters, you’ll have to use the on-screen dial pad instead.
The back of the Treo 600 has the speaker phone, the VGA (640x480) camera, the SIM slot (on the GSM version) and the reset hole. There’s not much back here. Just like the iPod, the battery for the Treo 600 is not user-replaceable, it is sealed inside the unit (there are websites that will sell you a replacement battery and have instructions on how to replace the battery though).
On the left side of the unit is the volume up and down buttons, which with tools like Butler can also be turned into page scrolling buttons. On the bottom is the charge/sync port and a 2.5mm headset jack – you’ll need to buy an adapter if you want to hook your 3.5mm headphones into the Treo 600 to listen to music. On the top of the unit is the SD slot (great for expanding memory), IR port, radio power button, and ringer on/off switch (one of my favorite features).
Inside the Treo 600 is a 144Mhz ARM processor and 32MB of memory. There is only 24MB of memory available to the user, so if you are a power-user, I would suggest getting a SD memory card to expand the memory. The GSM version of the Treo 600, which I am reviewing, is a quadband phone supporting 800, 900, 1800 and1900Mhz so that it can be used anywhere in the world.
The phone has a very iconic look to it and is easily recognizable, but it is anything but sexy. The phone is easy to hold and use, though, again, the stubby antenna is a bit annoying when putting the thing into a case on your belt.
Software
The Treo 600 runs Palm OS 5.2.1H. It is not the latest and greatest version of the Palm OS, but really there is not that much change in the Palm OS to know the difference. The applications that have been integrated into the Treo 600 are good enough for beginners, but there are better out there. I will go over some of them here in my review.
The phone application is as basic as it goes. You can put a background image on the default screen if you want to customize it. But, that is about all the customizing you can do. The phone app works well enough for me to make and receive phone calls. There is a call log that is good enough for me to keep track of my calls and minutes. There is nothing really to same about the phone application other than it just plain works. Actually using the phone is another story though. To answer an incoming call you push the middle button on the five-way nav disk or you can push “Answer “ on the touch screen. To hang up, you use backspace, or you can use the “Hang up” on the touch screen. The thing is that with the default phone application, if your face touches the screen, it make touch the Hang up button, which sits right in the middle of the screen. Very annoying. Also, the screen stays on for the duration of the call, draining the battery more than it should be. The screen can be locked through the System Preferences, but when you do that, you cannot use the screen to hang up calls – if you can’t remember which key was the hang up key on the keyboard. The screen can be set to turn off, but you’ll have to get a third party tool like Butler in order to do that.
The web browser is Blazer from Handspring and works pretty well. I like how it is able to reformat wide pages for viewing on the smaller screen. There are other web browsers out there like Xiino, but I think that the built-in web browser does a good enough job with web pages. This is a full web browser complete with Javascript support, so you can log into places like Gmail without problems. Surfing the web on the Treo is a slow ordeal and is by no means a replacement for a good notebook. Large webpages sometimes do not load on the web browser because of the limited memory that it has to work with. So, using the web browser for anything but pages built for mobile devices is a pain in the butt.
The built-in mail client is decent. Again, it is mainly for those who just need to have sometime to check their email with. You can set it to check POP accounts on a regular basis and store the mail on the Treo. It works, but there is better. The email software that I recommend is Chatter Email which allows for push IMAP email. This means that if your email service provider supports IMAP IDLE, then you are in for a treat. The instant that an email arrives on the server, the IMAP server will ping your Treo to let you know you have mail. This is in big contrast to how POP works, where the Treo can check mail on a regular basis and let you know when email has been downloaded. If you want instant email, then there’s nothing better than adding Chatter Email to the Treo. The one thing to keep in mind though is that Chatter Email will keep the data connection open all day long for this to happen. This has two side effects. First, if you are on a metered data plan, then you will have to watch out for overages. Second, by having the data on all day long, you will be draining the battery rather quickly. When I run Chatter Email on my Treo, I will have about 40% of my battery left by the end of the day – that is with minimal phone calling.
The Camera
Don’t expect much from the camera on the Treo 600. Actually, you should probably consider not considering the Treo 600 if pictures are important to you. The camera on the Treo 600 is pretty craptacular at best. The white balance is always off, the pictures area always washed out, the colors are not saturated, and in general it is just plain bad. Not to help it much either is that though the camera is listed as 640x480, it really looks like a 320x240 picture interpolated to 640x480 – lots of big ugly pixels all over the place. The camera application also applies a lot of compression to the pictures, making them even worse. There is a freeware utility named Qset that will let you adjust the JPEG compression of the camera app. But, face it, the pictures stink pretty bad already, by giving it less compression will not help much.
The Phone
As a phone, the Treo 600 is decent, but not the best. The reception of the phone on the T-Mobile network is lackluster when compared with my Samsung R225m and Motorola RAZR V3. Those phones pick up signals where the Treo 600 can’t. Though the Treo 600 handily beats out my old SonyEricsson T68i and T610, but that is not saying too much. The sound quality of the phone is pretty good and callers could not tell that I was on a mobile phone.
On my end though, because my ears are a little big, the antenna gets rather annoying. If you look at the picture of the Treo 600, you’ll notice the slot for the ear piece is rather high up on the phone face. When I place the phone on my ear, I have to place it low to get the hole to match up well with my ear to get good sound. When I do that, the antenna pokes right at the top of my ear. Not very comfortable to say the least.
The Keyboard
The keyboard works really well. The keys are a little small, but after using it for a while, I got used to them. There is not much room to roam around on the keyboard, but typing mistakes aren’t that many. I will not be writing a novel on this keyboard, but for SMS and short emails, the keyboard does just fine. The keyboard is very small when compared with the Danger Sidekick II’s keyboard and does not work as well. But, in the end, it is better than iTap or T9.
Synchronization
I synchronize my Treo 600 with my Powerbook just fine. It works with a USB cable and iSync. I use MissingSync from MarkSpace to do better synchronization though, it seems to work a lot better than HotSync + iSync.
Problems
Other than the antenna poking me in the ear, there are some problems with the software. The Treo 600 has locked up on me many times since I have starting using it. Thank goodness there is a reset pin built into the stylus. The GPRS data connection is also pretty flakey. When I had the original email application running and polling for email every 30 minutes, after a few hours the GPRS connection would fail to connect. It would sit there trying to connect, but it could never get connected. The solution? Turn off the radio using the radio on/off button and then turn it back on – which sounds simple, but is really a two to three minute exercise. On top of all of that, the Treo 600 would spontaneously reboot itself every few days for some unknown reason. I don’t know if it is an application I have installed on it or what, but it will just reboot itself. There are definitely bugs in the system that need to be looked at – but, looking at the support page at Palm, they will probably never get fixed since the last update for the Treo 600 is months old.
Conclusion
The Treo 600 is the blueprint for a great smartphone. I think that Palm flubbed the execution and have not gotten it right even with the newer Treo 650, which from what I read has even more system problems than the Treo 600. The hardware itself is good if you can stand carrying a large phone with you. Being able to have a Palm organizer combined with a phone is very cool and very useful. The keyboard on the Treo 600 is very usable, even though it is small. The camera on the Treo 600 is terrible. I would recommend the Treo 600 for those who have a high tolerance for system problems and have some technical abilities. For the normal user, it is still a good phone, but be prepared to call technical support for some of the odd quirks of the phone. I wish Palm would fix some of the oddities of the software.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 349
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Epinions.com ID:
mookiekong
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Location: San Jose, CA, USA
Reviews written: 68
Trusted by: 26 members
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Current Mookie Obsession: Apple iPhone 8GB and Fedora 8.
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