Palm Treo 700p reviewed.
At PC Mag:
The 700p's keys are squarer, making them a hair more
susceptible to mistyping. The Palm OS is getting old;
most notably, it doesn't support multitasking, which
is annoying when you're downloading e-mail and
want to do something else. But it's still tremendously
responsive and requires relatively few keypresses or
stylus taps to do what you want.
The Treo syncs easily with both Macs (with iSync or
Palm Desktop) and PCs (with Palm Desktop or Microsoft
Outlook), Mac users don't get the ultimate prize—the
ability to use the Treo as a USB modem on Sprint's EV-DO
network. With it hooked up to a PC using Sprint's Connection
Manager, I got excellent speeds of 900 to 1,100 Kbps.
That's awesome. But when I connected to a Mac using
Bluetooth, speeds slowed down to about 200 to 300 Kbps.
The problem is the Treo's Bluetooth 1.2 stack, which is just
too slow to handle the full speed of EV-DO. You won't get
that full speed in Palm's Blazer browser, either. Blazer's
not-so-fast rendering engine kept effective speeds on
bandwidth-test Web sites down to about 200 Kbps. But
the device as a whole feels very responsive, and it's fast
enough to play music or stream video.
Compare to RIM BlackBerry 8700g.
Infosync World:
Our fingertips were happy with the new keypad, although
we found reaching down for the Menu key to be annoyingly
awkward.
Palm Infocenter:
The Sprint-branded 700p in New York City, our surfing on the
revamped Blazer browser (which comes with improved caching
and Javascript support, among other changes) was impressively
fast, as were file downloads and over-the-air PIM synching.
Macworld:
The Treo 700p offers good syncing capability with your Mac,
either with the Palm Desktop software that comes on a CD-ROM
with the device or Apple’s built-in Address Book and iCal.
Mobilitytoday:
Video review and forum user feedback.
Brighthand:
Close up pictures of keyboard. Palm continues to ship
their devices with the Blazer web browser and VersaMail
email client, despite the fact that these two programs
account for an unnaturally large percentage of all complaints
about the Treo family of devices. However, it's not all bad.
Palm has, at the very least, done a bit of work to soup up
Blazer. While it's still hugely lacking in terms of page
rendering and visual style, it has gotten a significant
speed boost.
700p is considerably more stable than the Treo 650 was
at launch. Palm has been doing a lot lately to correct the
compatibility problems first introduced in the T5/Treo
650 generation.
tm-Cnet:
Market growth and loyal customer support for the Palm operating
system as reasons to continue to support the Palm operating
system. In fact, according to a 2005 Canalys report, Palm's
year-over-year smartphone growth from 2004 to 2005 was
111%. Their market share in 2004 was 26% and in 2005 grey
to 33% or one-third of the smartphone market. The overall
smartphone growth was 65%, however RIM, a Palm competitor
saw its market share dip from 57% to 53%.
