Palm Treo 700w EV-DO Smartphone (Verizon Wireless)

The Treo's phone features are all well and good, but you don't need broadband access just to make voice calls. Web access and email are where the EV-DO radio really shines, with speeds nearly 10 times faster than the Treo 650, and almost comparable to Wi-Fi/DSL access. On a 650, we often had to wait a minute or more for a complex page to load. With the 700w, the wait time is in seconds. Emails download proportionally faster too, although EV-DO upload speeds are only a fraction of the 400-700 Kbps downstream throughput. It will take a while to send a bunch of high-resolution photos taken with the built-in 1.3MP camera.

Setting up email was easy. You can either sync with your desktop Outlook program (Thunderbird or other email program users are out of luck), or enter your account info directly into the the Treo. Both POP and IMAP servers are supported, as well as Microsoft Exchange, of course. Attachments work really well compared to the Treo 650. You can send and receive almost anything, and open it with the included Office Mobile applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), or the Picsel PDF Viewer. We set the Messaging app to connect and retrieve email automatically every few minutes, as long as the phone was active.

You can send photos directly from within the Pictures & Video interface. Just click on a picture to open it, then press the Send button at bottom left to address your email and add a message. Photos are up to 1280-by-1024, almost four time the image size as the Treo 650. To take a picture, you simply select the Camera icon, aim the viewfinder/LCD screen at your subject, and click the center button in the five-way navigator. It took us a while to figure out which button to press, since there's no indication in the Camera interface, but it worked well. Detail was good, although colors washed out.

The 700w ships with wide variety of other software as well, most notably Windows Media Player Mobile. With Windows Media Player 10 on your desktop, you can sync your choice of audio, photo, and video files, and even play back streaming Internet radio. Microsoft promises future support for DRM formats, making it a great MP3 player -- as long as you add a memory expansion card. The internal memory is woefully inadequate, with just 60MB free for the user, and no match for a large MP3 or photo collection.

Internal RAM is also in short supply. While the OS is multitasking, memory availability limits this feature to about 3 or 4 major applications. The OS will recognize RAM shortages and automatically close the least-used applications for you, or you can choose to stop a program yourself from deep within the Settings menus. We added Handmark Express, a location-based information utility, to push RAM to the limit. We'd prefer to see a pop-up menu appear when RAM is low, asking apps we'd like to close, but it would probably come up so often that it would just get annoying. One unique feature that we didn't get to really evaluate is Microsoft's Voice Command software, which lets you operate most functions no-handed. Those who talk a lot while driving will want to take advantage of this capability.

What about Wi-Fi you say? It's not built-in, but you can add Palm's $99 802.11b Wi-Fi card, or other third-party cards that work with Windows Mobile. Be sure they are certified to work with WM5.0. We test the Palm card, and had no problem getting connected to both open and WEP- or WPA-encrypted networks.

Wi-Fi operation was transparent. We just plugged the card into the Treo, and a box popped up with a list of available networks. Select one, enter your encryption key if needed, and you're off. From then on, the Treo will recognize that network when in range, and connect automatically via Wi-Fi in preference to EV-DO when accessing the Internet. Even better, you can make and receive voice calls via EV-DO at the same time as using Wi-Fi for Net access.

The two key drawbacks to the non-integrated Wi-Fi are that you can't use a Wi-FI card and a memory expansion card at the same time, and that the Palm card sticks WAY out the top of the unit, even farther than the antenna. We'd hesitate to put the Treo with card in a pocket for fear of losing it. We also had to do a couple of soft resets during our testing when the Treo just stopped "seeing" the Palm card. It reappeared each time after the reset. We'd advise waiting for a WM5/Palm certified third-party card that combines Wi-Fi with memory, so you don't have to compromise.

Bluetooth setup is simpler. You just turn the Bluetooth 1.2 radio on, select a compatible device, and connect to it. We had no problem using the Palm Bluetooth headset with the 700w, and synching our laptop over Bluetooth. Other devices like printers, GPS adapters and USB-Bluetooth dongles are also supported, but we didn't test them. What you can't do, due to restrictions from Verizon, is use the Treo as a broadband modem for your laptop. Sprint's PPC-6700, also based on WM5, lets you do that. Verizon's policy may change, as the company has recently opened up tethering for other EV-DO phones, but a software upgrade will be required.

The 700w comes with a USB sync cable, earbud headset, and power adapter in the box, but you'll likely want to add a few other accessories, such as an extra battery, carrying case, auto adapter, and perhaps a desktop cradle that doubles as a second battery charger. Battery life is rated at about 5 hours of talk time, but we got a lot less using Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Basically, we had to keep it charging every night when we used it regularly. You can save a lot of money by buying the various accessories in one handsome leather roll-up travel kit for $199. The kit also includes a set of international plug adapters and an extra stylus.

So should you buy a Treo 700w? If you like Window Mobile, waste no time in running out to your Verizon store -- the 700w is the best Windows Mobile smartphone on the market, by a long shot. Similarly, corporate users of Exchange email servers will benefit from the native email support. In fact, the Palm-Microsoft collaboration came about because of the Palm OS's shortcomings in the corporate marketplace, and it is an unqualified success from that point of view. Current Treo 650 users and Mac owners have a different perspective. If you use an iPod for your media, and prefer the Palm interface, by all means stick with the 650, or wait for a broadband Palm OS solution.