Business review: Palm Treo 750v

An impressive 3G smartphone that lets business users screen calls and receive push email

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Price: £150 + VAT or less, depending on mobile tariff

Manufacturer: Palm

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Verdict

The Treo 750v is small enough to be used as a phone, and just large enough for a practical qwerty keyboard to ease data input. Palm’s careful attention to detail makes this one of the better Windows Mobile devices we have seen.

Pros: Good user interface; well-laid out qwerty keypad; rubberised case.

Cons: Relatively small keys; Vodafone 3G limited to metropolitan areas.

Daniel Robinson, IT Week 10 Nov 2006

Palm’s Treo 750v is a Windows Mobile smartphone built with an emphasis on ease of use. The device fits between standard phones and larger devices like a BlackBerry in size, but still squeezes in a full qwerty keypad and support for enterprise features such as push email.

Available now through Vodafone, the new Treo is a quad-band phone that integrates 3G connectivity and GPRS for data transfers. It also supports Bluetooth for wireless headsets and car kits, but lacks a WLAN interface for high-speed web browsing. Palm said it decided a WLAN would be too great a drain on the device’s battery life.

Although there are many Windows Mobile 5.0 handsets, Palm has customised the user interface of the Treo 750v to make key functions easy to access.

The ‘Today’ home screen, for example, provides a search box to look up a query on Google, a link to dial in directly to your voicemail, and a speedy dial tool that searches your contact list as you start to key in the name of the person to call, then dials the number for you.

The Treo is narrower than a typical BlackBerry handset, and a BlackBerry user would probably find its keyboard cramped by comparison. However, we found we could enter text at a reasonable speed by cradling the device in two hands and using thumbs to type. Although the Treo has a touch screen, dedicated “OK” and Windows menu keys mean that the stylus is hardly required and most functions can be accessed via the keypad. Another new feature of the 750v is a rubberised case that makes it more comfortable to grip.

Like earlier Treo models, the 750v threads text messages, so that users can see the history of SMS messages they have exchanged with a contact.

There is the also the ability to decline an incoming call and send the caller a text message. The device lets the user define template messages such as “busy, will call you later” that can be sent with a few key presses.

The Treo is “HSDPA-ready”, according to Palm, but while this high-speed service is operating on some parts of Vodafone’s 3G network, it is not enabled on the Treo. Vodafone said it will offer this in the future, but did not say whether a firmware upgrade would be required.

Vodafone offers two push email services for Treo users on its network; a Windows Mobile Email service for firms with Exchange 2003 SP2 mail servers; and Vodafone Mail, which supports older versions of Exchange and other mail systems such as Lotus Notes/Domino. Like other Windows Mobile handsets, the 750v has the Office Mobile versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, which can be used to create documents as well as view attachments sent by email.

The device has a removable 1250mAh battery offering up to 4.5 hours talk time, and up to 10 days on standby. A Mini SD slot allows for Flash cards to expand storage, and the Treo also has a 1.3 megapixel camera.

See also:

Interview: Getting the message across

John Walker, Palm Europe's head of enterprise sales engineering for the UK and Ireland, believes mobile email has not reached its full potential in the European market 01 Nov 2006