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Treo 700w Review

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the sprinting-backwards dept.

bart_scriv writes "Business Week has a review of Palm's Treo 700w (the first Palm device to run Windows). Aside from network performance, the reviewer was fairly disappointed. From the article: 'The best Windows Mobile device ever, but a cut below Palm's 650."

6 of 45 comments (clear)

  1. Fullpage Advertisents are always fun by Eightyford · · Score: 4, Informative

    Reviews Without Fullpage Advertisements

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    Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
  2. indows won't support the sharper image. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    It won't. It'll support lots of resolutions, but apparently 320x320 is not one of them.

  3. Re:Comment about "web performance" amusing by fishybell · · Score: 5, Informative
    Having recently programmed a multi-user wireless sync server using a Treo 650 as a test platform, I have to agree with at least some of your post. Yes, blazer sucks big time. It's slow and renders pages oddly at best. Overall though, the phone works great. I never had it crash (my boss crashes his once or twice a week), but my supervisor's 700w crashes once a day.

    The 650 is probably an 3/5 star phone, but as a pda it's very impressive. Because of the abundance of third party apps, the ease of syncing (works flawlessly with the open, and easy to program for pilot-link), and the openness of the Palm platform (relative to Windows Mobile at least), ensures that I won't ever let anyone else at my company buy a Treo 700 until the "p" version comes out.

    If you need a pda, and a phone, and have to integrate the syncronization with your ERP or CRM applications, Palm or Linux phones are the only way to go. If it crashes, complain to tech support, flash newer firmware, repeat. Much easier than trying to get Microsoft to fix windows.

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    ><));>
  4. Some clarifications by TimmyDee · · Score: 4, Informative

    While most of your comments are true, you do ignore one glaring detail: Opera is available for the Treo.

    Palm has provided the necessary Java runtime environment free of charge to 650 users (and $5.99 for others). Once downloaded, you can run Opera or Kmaps (an excellent Java app that downloads data from Google Local and even gets the scrolling part down well) or any other Java app compiled for Palm OS. I use both routinely on my Treo 600 and get pretty decent performance out of Opera. With a GPRS connection no less!

    (While I agree that the first generation 650s froze often, those issues have been fixed with firmware updates. This doesn't excuse the initial lock-ups, but it's not a fault of Palm OS necessarily, just as 240x240 is not necessarily a fault of Windows Mobile (although the lack of 320x320 is)).

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    Per Square Mile, a blog about density
  5. Re:Supports satellite-tracking attachments? by Eric+Smith · · Score: 3, Informative
    but the satellite simply responds to your location request.
    No, it doesn't do that either. It just broadcasts. It doesn't have any idea that you (or your receiver) want location information, any more than a DJ at a local radio station knows when you tune in to his show.
  6. 240x240 screen won't support most PocketPC apps. by ad454 · · Score: 5, Informative
    The small 240x240 display prevents the Treo 700w from properly running nearly most PocketPC applications that require a min 240x320 resolution. When the previous Treo 650 (Palm) phone has a 320x320 display, I cannot understand why Treo would downgrade the display on their new phone.

    On my Audiovox PPC-4100 PocketPC phone, I run numerous third party PocketPC applications that won't work properly on the Treo 700w. I can't live without these apps, especially when I travel.
    • Mapopolis (GPS maps of North America & Western Europe with realtime turn-by-turn navigation)
    • WorldMate Pro (instantly download worldwide weather and currency exchange)
    • Pocket Universe (astronomy maps of the sky from any location)
    • Ephemeris (worldwide moon and sun tracker)
    • AventGo (automatically download hundreds of pages of news and other info when you sync to read offline, if only slashdot had an AventGo channel)
    • Japan2Go & China2Go (talking English to Japanese and Chinese phase dictionary)
    • Eval (best scientific calculator for PocketPC
    • Pocket Slides (displays my PowerPoint presentations with full animation on my phone
    • PocketLingo (English dictionary & Thesaurus)
    • vxUtil (excellent network utility with NTP, ping, traceroute, password generator, etc.)
    • PockeTTY (full featured Telnet & SSH client)
    • Adobe Reader (read Adobe Acrobat files)
    • RESCO Picture Viewer (great multi-format image viewer, supports multipage TIFF faxes)
    • X-Lite & Skype (VoIP clients)
    • PPT (a really handy periodic table)
    • Pocket Console & CMD (a DOS shell is very handy)
    • PHM Registry Editor (useful application)
    • SignTrust Desktop (full featured file manager with CMS based encryption, digital signatures, and time-stamping)