Review: PalmOne Treo 650 from Orange

Until very recently I would have been willing state publicly that all “smart phones” are stupid. While gaget industries have been able to make perfectly functional personal organizers, and sleek mobile phones, the combination of of these concepts is usually less than the sum of it’s parts.

PocketTunes running on my Treo 650. This application gives the device capabilities similar to an iPod mini. With the 1GB SD card I can store and play plenty of Ogg-Vorbis tracks.

I’ve been fooled into parting with cash for the latest upgrade; my crisp pounds exchanged for flaky plastic: I’ve grown so jaded with the category that I had the lowest expectations when I placed an order for the new PalmOne Treo 650 from Orange. It turns out that I was wrong to be so glum – the new Treo is one of the niftiest gadgets I’ve owned in a long time.

The major selling point of the Treo series is it’s use of Palm OS. Most smart phones these days run Microsoft’s bloated “Windows Mobile Edition” or the rather annoying Symbian family of operating system.

Palm OS, one of the oldest mobile operating systems was originally designed to run on 3Com’s range of Palm-Pilot organizers; tiny machines which could run for days on a pair of AAA batteries. The reason Palm were able to do this was that they take a stripped down approach to computing; While palm apps tend to have fewer features than their Windows equivalents the minimalist approach seems more suitable for tiny devices.

Returning to Palm OS felt very comfortable; my last Palm device was the Palm 3c, which I destroyed by dropping in a puddle almost five years ago.

While the Palm OS is superficially as minimalist as ever, there are a lot more bells and whistles included in the latest version of the software: It’s now a fully multitasking system with impressive multimedia capabilities and support for high-resolution screens. Most importantly, it worked perfectly with the Kpilot, my preferred Linux-based synchronization tool. Being able to synch with my Linux Desktop is a big win gain.

The biggest change is the addition of the thumb-board in place of the graffiti area. The original palm-pilots had an excellent handwriting recognition system which was very easy to learn. I guess the success of the Blackberry proved that busy executives prefer thumb-boards and are unwilling to learn how to use a stylus. While I miss graffiti, I have found the thumb-board very easy to adapt to.

My Treo came with a suite of standard Internet tools; Oddly enough, their icons have been made slightly orangy – and put into a category called ‘Orange’, a feeble attempt by my phone company to brand the Internet. This was easily defeated by renaming the category which allowed me to debrand my palmtop.

The tools include web-browser called ‘Blazer’ which does a very good job of rendering most pages. I was able to visit my favorite sites and read them without difficulty.

Palm also provide an excellent email program called Versamail which supports POP3 and IMAP with SSL. A nifty feature of this program is that it includes standard configurations for the 50 biggest ISPs, meaning that setting up an email account requires little more than typing in a login and password.

When the machine was launched, palm gurus complained that the machine was less efficient than previous generations at managing memory; apparently the new filing system takes a less granular approach to storage and has a tendency to waste a few kilobytes if a database or resource partially occupies a page of system memory.

Having not used a Palm OS machine in five years, I cannot say I noticed a memory shortage. Just in case I also bought a 1GM SD RAM card which provides storage for documents and MP3/Ogg files. With the supplied headset, I can use my Palm somewhat like an iPod mini.

Minor quibbles aside, this is a good machine. It feels solidly built and is very easy to use. I expect that Palm will win back a group of users like myself who have defected to Sony and Nokia products in the absence of a credible Palm OS based alternative.