Palm Treo 650 Smartphone

If you want a Smartphone for mainly Personal Information Management (PIM -Contacts, Diary, Notes), email communication plus telephone calls, this is your phone. I have had one for two years and have just bought another, newer one. I intend using it for years yet. Nothing else comes close to ease of use and functionality.

Palm's OS and interface make navigation easy - no nested menus and obscure settings, everything is easily accessible and understandable. Phone interation with Contacts is brilliant and you can refer to Calendar while on the phone, too.

Want to surf the web - select web and you're online - no fussy set-up. Okay, so its GPRS speed, but for looking up stuff (company phone numbers/email), it's easily fast enough. It's certainly good enough to view ebay and news services.

Want email, setting it up is a doddle and you can have multiple accounts. Want to view your office email via MS Exchange - again, no problem. GPRS pull email is easily adequate or most people.

View Word, Excel, Powerpoint documents with integrated applications and buy cheap third-party applications to enhance it - finance, passwords. View Acrobat documents with another free application.

Play MP3s (Free RealPlayer) and watch films (Free TCPMP player).

And one-handed operation is easy with the integrated keyboard and navigation/menu buttons. No other Smartphone is as easy to use one-handed. You can get to just about everything without using the stylus. But the touchscreen/stylus combination is still the most sensible option - pressing buttons on-screen with fingers just contaminates the screen and is difficult one-handed (because the area you need to cover to select on-screen letters is too big), while slide-out keypads waste time, are more flimsy and not so convenient.

Battery life? Well, I have a 2400 mAh battery (1800 std) and I can get five days' intensive use out of it, no problem. If you charge a battery and put the Treo in a draw and don't use it, it will last for months. This is not the same for the 680 which uses a 1200 battery and runs down faster.

Crashes/hangs? Yes, they happen - very occassionally - but just a press of the reset button and you're back to where you were in seconds - no data loss. Plus with PC back-up you are not going to lose any data should you lose the phone or break it.

Bulky? Yes, it's bigger than a normal phone, but smaller than some Nokia's. I use a belt clip case and it is just fine. You can put it in a suit inside pocket, however.

In short, it will be a while yet before anything comes close to this phone's PIM strengths. But if you want intensive web, music and video capabilities, look elsewhere for sure. This is a businessman's tool.

This is a fantastic phone/pda; it's easy to use and does all you could ask for and more. The GPRS is a good enough speed and it saves the need for a 3G sim card and signal. The Palm software seems to be more stable than that for Windows powered devices. There is a great deal of extra software that can be installed.

One word of caution though - it seems very hard to get at Treo 650 that is sim locked unlocked. The first one I won was locked to Orange and I couldn't find anywhere either in shops/markets or online who could unlock it. Fortunately, I was able to sell it onto a friend and buy an unlocked version, which I love.

Great phone, even though I've got fingers like a blind cobblers thumb, I find the little keyboard very easy to use and I rarely press a key in error. I use it it conjunction with a little program called Goosync that enables me to sync the phone calendar with my Google calendar.

Call quality is very good, the only thing that would persuade me to upgrade would be a version that could use wireless networks like my laptop instead of using the expensive gprs connection to browse the web.

Clint Randall

i got the treo about a week ago but even now i have fallen in love with it! it is really good i would definately advise ones to go for it!

i bought this phone as part of my journey into the past looking ay phones that were above average and offered a bit more than the most popular phones at that time. this phone was one of the good ones which really never hit it off in the uk as it was only really available on orange and remote unlocking was not available back then. this phone is a little gem and offers push email and blackberry connect compatible if you can find the software. it is a PDA and a phone combined. there is still loads of free software that can be bought for this platform Palm OS 5.4 so customization to our needs is very much a possibility. i am going to see how and how far i can push this phone and compare to the latest offerings like the blackberry storm, bold, iphone etc. no chance you say well you never know.............

Very good PDA and smartphone, easy to use has windows, (very good online support) and pc sync as well as GPS, all in one small package easy keypad and the touch screen operation is handy as well, All in all a good all rounder with any amount of add ons, from keyboard to bluetooth ear piece if you are looking for a little bit more than just a phone then these are worth a look, unlike Blackberry they don't need the extra cost of push email so they also keep your running costs down and are great to use on Pay as you go tarifs. Battery live real good 4 to 5 days with lots of texts and odd call, memory wise comes with 34mb but you can add 10mb via SD card so you won't ever be short, also lots of programmes online to upgrade and improve you Palm Treo. Verdic:A good Buy.

have changed the whole case so looks as new,is working well, with all the features than you can expect from a pda and phone have had meny palm pda in the past, thank you,gwyn

Great Palm OS Smartphone.
Everything working fine on O2(UK) PAY&GO. (Except I can't send SMS texts).
Plenty of free applications on-line. Palm OS rules.....