Brighthand Reviews the palmOneTreo 650 -- Part II

The Screen

The Treo 650 has a 320-by-320-pixel display, which is four times the resolution of its predecessor. This is a beautiful color screen that leaves the ones you typically get on mobile phones in the dust.

Because this is a device intended to be carried around everywhere, it's smaller than the average handheld. This means that the screen is smaller, too.

The advantage of this is pixels are small and tightly packed, which is one of the reasons why the screen looks so good.

The disadvantage is things on the screen are kind of small. In some cases you can bump up the font sizes, but not always. If your eyes aren't what they used to be, expect to get your glasses out a lot when using the Treo.

As I said, the Treo 650's screen looks outstanding... while you're indoors. It looks about as well outdoors as any LCD of its type. In short, it's marginal. You can look up a phone number in direct sunlight, but you probably aren't going to want to do much else. In shadow, the screen is fairly readable, as long as you bump the backlight way up.

When you are using the Treo 650 as a phone, the screen is going to come into contact with your cheek, where your skin oils will cloud the display. I end up having to clean off the screen at the end of almost every call unless I use the wired headset that comes with this smartphone.

In a nice touch, you can set the Treo 650 to automatically turn off the digitizer when you're on a phone call. This means that your earrings or beard won't accidentally touch something on screen and, in a worst case scenario, cut off your phone call.

The Keyboard

One of the best features of the Treo 650 is its QWERTY keyboard. Plenty of other smartphones lack one of these, which forces their users to slowly enter text through a numberpad.

However, keyboards on devices like this are always a compromise. If you make the keyboard large enough to be very easy to use, you make the whole device too large to easily fit in your pocket.

This is why the Treo 650's keyboard is a bit cramped. Getting used to it takes some of practice, but I eventually got pretty good at it.

After using it for a while, I can do about 30 words a minute, which is much, much faster than I can enter text with Graffiti, the character-recognition system used by most Palm OS models.

I'm pretty accurate, too. You'd think you'd be constantly pressing multiple keys at the same time, but you don't. I even tried typing with the flat of my thumb and I never hit more than a single key. This is because the Treo 650's software is smart enough to ignore accidental key presses.

Buttons

The buttons on a device might not seem very important, but you really notice if they are done poorly. Not only are the Treo 650's done well, they are outstanding.

Between the screen and the keyboard are a set of six buttons and a directional pad. With these, you can do almost anything on this smartphone with just one hand.

You can be walking down the street with a briefcase in one hand and your Treo in the other. Without ever touching the stylus or the screen, you can look up a phone number and make a call, check your email, glance at your schedule, surf to one of your favorite places, and more.

Kudos to the palmOne developers who worked very hard to make this possible.

On the left side of the Treo is a rocker switch to let you easily change the volume of the phone's speaker or of its music software.

Below that is a button that can be used to launch any application you want. I have mine set to start up the camera. Because of its location, it's easy to accidentally press this button while you're on the phone, so you have to hold it down for a couple of seconds in order for it to respond.

Sprint Wireless Service

As I said earlier, the only wireless company offering the Treo 650 at this point is Sprint.

Sprint uses CDMA wireless networks, which in general I find to be a superior standard to its rival, GSM/GPRS. When I was in a room in the middle of a building, the Treo 650 had a decent connection (two bars), while my T-Mobile phone couldn't make any kind of connection, voice or data.

Data transfer speed is decent, but not great. It reminds me of using an older dial-up modem.

It's plenty fast enough for email, but you'll probably find yourself turning the graphics off in Blazer to speed your surfing up.

There's an important thing you need to know about this device: once it is connected to Sprint's network, it doesn't sign off unless you tell it to. If you don't have an unlimited data plan, you could get a huge cell phone bill because you've been continuously connected to the network for an entire month.

There are two ways to deal with this. The first is to simply get an unlimited data plan. It doesn't cost too much, and odds are you're going to get a lot of email and do a lot of web surfing on your Treo.

The other option is to go into Prefs > Network and manually disconnect from PCS Vision every time you do something online.

Bluetooth

The Treo 650 has Bluetooth short-range wireless networking, but I found this to be less useful than I hoped.

Currently, mostly what you can do with this is connect to wireless headsets. And, sadly, it can't do that very well. I get static if the headset gets more than just a few feet away from the Treo. And Larry Becker, a Brighthand staffer who's had a Treo 650 for months, reports that he gets static at almost any range if his device is in the leather case he bought for it. He's currently looking for a plastic case to see if this helps matters.

Thankfully, this smartphone comes with a regular wired headset, so you don't have to depend on Bluetooth for this.

At this point, the Treo 650 can't be used as a wireless modem for other devices, like a laptop. This is because Sprint disabled Dial-Up Networking. The good news is Sprint received so much bad press for this it has promised to release a system patch that will put DUN back in. In the mean time, an industrious programmer has released his own patch that does the same thing.

Also, I tried to use another Bluetooth device to access the files stored on the Treo 650, but it's not possible. This is something I do all the time with my Sony Ericsson phone, but the Treo doesn't offer this feature, either.

At least I was able to wirelessly transfer address information from another Bluetooth-enabled device to the Treo 650.

I'm happy to be able to say that Think Outside just released a driver that allows the Treo 650 to use the Stowaway Bluetooth keyboard, a full-sized keyboard that folds up for easy portability. The mini keyboard built into this smartphone is nice, and definitely better than Graffiti, but it isn't as good as a full-size keyboard for typing long documents.

Wi-Fi

palmOne decided to not put Wi-Fi into the Treo 650, although this is a feature available in several of its competitors.

Even worse, this smartphone can't use palmOne's own Wi-Fi SD card. Company executives are hemming and hawing about possibly adding support for this networking card at some point, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Still, there is a solution. Or there will be soon. Enfora has announced a Wi-Fi sled for the Treo 650. This will let the device be connected to both cellular-wireless networks and Wi-Fi networks simultaneously. The down side: it is going to add significantly to the Treo's size. But it includes its own battery, so it won't be drawing from the Treo's.

Please keep reading Part III