palmOne Treo 650

Introduction / Preview : palmOne Treo 650

I have been a very satisfied and happy Treo 600 user since October 2003. The Treo 600 has made my life much easier and I no longer carry around a mobile phone AND a handheld device.

When Handspring (the creators of the Treo 600 before they were acquired by Palm Inc., in end-2003) first conceived the Treo 600, they targeted it plainly at only one group of users who would appreciate its efficient user interface the most – business users who needed to access to the Internet and to their data whilst on the move.

This strategy led to the most glaring fault of the Treo 600 – its outdated color screen. As I’ve mentioned in my earlier review of the Treo 600, the biggest downside was the low-res, 11.5 bit colour screen, which was an inexplicable design choice, given that back in Oct 2003, high-res, 16 bit colour screens were already commonplace.

Having said that, the Treo 600’s usefulness still meant that all my other PDAs and mobile phones had been rendered totally redundant. The Treo 600 became my daily use device, and took over all the other functions which I required from my mobile phone and PDA, and amongst other, my CLIE NX80 and Zodiac 2 were eventually disposed of, as I no longer used them often enough to justify their presence.

When news first broke that palmOne was updating the Treo 600 (to include a high-res screen), I was overjoyed and waited patiently to get my grubby hands on one – which I finally did a few days ago, and I’m pleased to say, the Treo 650 is everything the Treo 600 was, and more.

Design and finish The Treo 650 looks almost identical to the Treo 600. I’ve been using the review unit for four days now, and no one has noticed that I’m carrying a different device.

That’s not such a bad thing at all, in fact, I believe the design choice was an intentional one. The Treo 600’s body was almost perfect for me, and in my opinion, has not been surpassed yet by any other handheld device. The presence of the antenna, however (even if slightly reduced in size) still irks me a little.

The Treo 650’s casing is made of plastic, like the Treo 600, but spray-painted with a darker metallic grey colour, with a smooth matte finish, plus silver accents. I think it looks and feels classier compared to the Treo 600, which felt a bit plasticky at times.

Upon closer inspection, there are several noticeable differences. Firstly, the Treo 650 is slightly thicker (about 1 mm), and noticeably heavier. The official specs list the Treo 650 at 178 grams, about 10 grams heavier than the Treo 600. But if you have been carrying the Treo 600 around the last few months, you will notice the additional heft. If you’re a new user, then it is noticeably heavier than most mobile phones around. It still fits snugly into my pants pocket, though, and it’s never uncomfortable.

Next, the Treo 650 has a replaceable battery. The cover comes off very easily and snaps back securely, without any problems. palmOne also added a new button on the left side of the Treo 650, below the “up-down” volume rocker and removed the “on-off” button at the top, which was used to turn on/off the phone function on the Treo 600. The rest of the layout of the Treo 650 is very much similar to the Treo 600 and I won’t bother with the details, as these have been covered previously in various other forums.

Overall, the Treo 650 looks and feels very solidly constructed and its finish impeccable. Here are some pictures of the Treo 650 and the Treo 600 side by side, showing the differences between the two devices.

Thumbpad and buttons

The Treo 650 thumbpad is almost identical to the Treo 600, except that the “home” and “menu” buttons have been moved up next to the 5-way directional pad. The thumbpad keys are larger and flatter than the Treo 600’s and much more comfortable to type on. I find I make fewer mistakes with my typing now. The thumbpad is also much brighter when lit up in the dark, compared to the Treo 600.

The 5-way directional pad has been made slightly smaller, and the “home” and “menu” buttons now flank the 5-way. The remainder four hard buttons are now assigned to the “phone”, “calendar”, “messaging” and “on/off” applications / functions.

The blue “option” button, as in the Treo 600, can be used to access numbers on the thumbpad, and other keyboard characters, and alternate hard button applications.

The change of layout of the “home” and “menu” buttons confused me for a short while, but after four days’ use, I find it much more intuitive to have these two buttons at the top of the thumbpad, rather than at the bottom. palmOne thought this one out quite well.

The thumbpad is now my primary means of data entry and it’s ease of use (for me, at least) cannot be overstated. Frankly, I can’t even remember how to type SMSes using T9 anymore…

Display

In two words – totally beautiful. It’s bright, sharp, clear, and the colour balance is very good. It looks as good as the other Palm OS handhelds out there, e.g. the T3 and the Zires. Small fonts, etc, look great, and I can’t stop looking at the screen. Even the pictures of my little girl looks terrific!

Compared to the Treo 600, the old device looks totally obsolete. Here are some pictures comparing the two screens in bright and dark conditions.

This should have been the screen on the Treo 600, but oh well, at least palmOne has decided to finally resolve the Treo 600’s biggest flaw.

Camera/Video

This is the other significant improvement made by palmOne over the Treo 600. As most Treo 600 users would know, the camera on the Treo 600, whilst serviceable, was actually quite crappy at taking pictures, even in broad daylight.

This has been greatly improved in the Treo 650, especially in low-light conditions. Night photos are now possible, and even look acceptable. Colour balance has also been greatly improved, and pictures just look much better.

The resolution is still stuck at 640 x 480 though. No mega-pixel camera here, unfortunately. But the quality of the camera is untouched, and I believe it’s comparable to even the best mega-pixel phone cameras in the market, like the Nokia 7610.

I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.

Treo 600	Treo 650
In my car, in the carpark
From my balcony in afternoon
Inside my living room in afternoon

The camera also doubles as a video capture device, and this is done quite admirably well too. The camera records video at 352 x 288 or 176 x 144 resolutions. Both pictures and videos can be recorded directly onto the SD expansion card, and is not limited by size. Pictures are captures in .jpg format, whilst video in .3gp format.

PIM functions and desktop synchronisation

The Palm OS version is Garnet, version 5.4.5, and the built-in PIM apps are similar to the Tungsten T5’s. I won’t bother to cover the same in any further detail, as these apps have been previously discussed at length before. Suffice to say, the PIM apps work as advertised – which is quite well, and I’ve done away with my third party apps.

Desktop synchronization to Palm Desktop and Microsoft Outlook is available, but media like pictures and video will only be sync-ed with Palm Desktop. Outlook synchro is totally built-in, and Chapura Pocketmirror (which was used for the Treo 600) is no longer required. One advantage I’ve noticed from this is that, in the past, I had to start Outlook on my PC before Hotsync will sync (via Pocketmirror) with my desktop, but now this is no longer required. Much cleaner interface here.

Realplayer is built-in for playback of audio files as well. I’ve also tested most of my applications which I use with my Treo 600 and almost all of them work ok. These include iSilo 4.0, Tealdoc 5.56, Adobe Reader 3.0, MS Dict 4.10, MetrO 5.21, Kinoma Player 2.0, McFile 2.2b3, McPhling 5.0, ScreenShot 5, snapCalc5, Bejeweled 2 and Monopoly.

Here are some screenshots I’ve taken off the Treo 650 so far.

Phone application	Phone application – favourites list
Calendar – day view	Calendar – week view
Calendar – month view	Messaging
VersaMail – main view	VersaMail – email view
Bluetooth control panel	Bluetooth setup
Media application – thumbnail view	RealPlayer
Info view	Info view – Palm OS version Garnet

GSM connection

like the Treo 600, the Treo 650 is also a quad-band GSM phone (850/900/1800/1900).

Mobile coverage and reception (using StarHub and Singtel) seems no different from the Treo 600, although network recovery after disconnection is slightly faster, and dropped connections occur less frequently. Haven’t used this enough yet, so can’t really comment on this in detail.

Battery life Battery life is rated at 6 hours talktime with 300 hours standby in the spec sheet. My usage patterns means that the device usually lasts about 2-3 days average for me, i.e. it will go the whole weekend for me without re-charging.

My initial thoughts on the battery life is that it’s quite similar to that of the Treo 600, which is very good to start with. Going my anecdotal evidence, this will definitely outlast a similarly configured PPC handheld, but not most mobile phones.

Memory system The Treo 650 uses the new NVFS (non-volatile file system) memory system, which means that even if the battery is dead, all data remains intact, even for years after that. No more lost data after keeping your handheld in the drawer for too long!

However, the drawback is that the NVFS uses a minimum of 512 bytes per block of memory, i.e. if you have stored only 1 byte of information, say in a memo containing only the letter “Q” for example, that memo will take up 512 bytes of space. This means although there is 22 Mb of memory available out of the box, actual memory usage will differ significantly from previous palmOne devices.

This issue first occurred with the Tungsten T5 and has been discussed extensively in this and other forums as well. palmOne has in fact already promised a fix for this in due course, although no news yet on when this will be.

I discovered from my own tests that this “memory bloat” issue led to quite significant increases in the amount of space taken up by both my data files and applications. As a comparison, my Treo 600 used to have on average, about 12 to 13 Mb of free space, but on the same configuration (same apps and databases), my Treo 650 has only about 7 to 8 Mb of free space.

In my view, palmOne should have increased the amount of memory available out of the box on this one to at least 64 Mb.

Connectivity

The Treo 650 has GPRS, Infrared and Bluetooth wireless connectivity. Bluetooth functions worked flawlessly in my tests with other mobile phones, and my SE HBH-65 head set.

GPRS connection over my Starhub account was also flawless in my tests, except for a software bug with the “web” program which kept re-dialling my Starhub MMS network connection rather than my GPRS connection. this prevented me from testing the web browser program. I managed to test the GPRS connection with VersaMail though, and my emails were downloaded and sent without any hitches. Very similar experience to my Treo 600 with SnapperMail. Haven’t managed to test out attachments to emails, etc, and will update this review when I’ve had the chance to do so at my own leisure.

Again, no Wi-Fi built-in for the Treo 650. Personally, I don’t need Wi-Fi, so it’s makes no difference to me. But I understand this irks quite a few people out there, so palmOne has, I believe, started working on drivers for their palmOne Wi-Fi SD card to make it compatible with the Treo 650.

Pricing

The Treo 600 is retailing for about $1188 without a telco contract, which is actually lower than the launch price for the Treo 600 back in Oct 2003. This is still somewhat beyond most people’s budget.

However, compared to the other devices that the Treo 650 is competing against, e.g. XDA Mini, XDA IIs, SE P910i, and the HP PPC smartphones, it does appear competitive. With added telco discount, it may cost less than $1000 eventually, and this will compare quite favourably with the above devices.

•  Related Articles