Palm Treo Pro

Call Quality

Calls and speakerphone: For the most part, we found calls loud and clear on the Palm Treo Pro. We rarely used the side volume keys to adjust the sound up or down. Callers said we sounded loud and clear. Using the speakerphone didn’t seem to degrade call quality on our end and we appreciate that we were able to speak simultaneously when using the speakerphone. Additionally, you don’t have to be too close to the cell phone when using this feature to be heard by callers – a definite plus. However, we wish it was easier to activate the feature when on a call.

Audio quality: Playback of songs through the cell phone’s speakers is impressive. The Palm Treo Pro comes with a 3.5mm headset jack, which means you can use your own stereo headphones to listen to music stored on the smartphone. That said, unless the headphones you use are cell phone-capable you won’t be able to take calls with them. If this is a concern, the Palm Treo Pro supports stereo Bluetooth, so you can always use a stereo Bluetooth-enabled headset or portable speaker.

Ease of Use

Menu/phone book: The Palm Treo Pro runs the Windows Mobile Operating System. As is the trend with other Windows Mobile smartphones, Palm has added a few features of its own to make personaliztion a bit easier. For starters, you can easily re-assign pre-assigned application launch keys to your favorite application (think: changing the calendar button to launch the camera). Additionally, there are still two ways to launch Windows on the Palm Treo Pro: the top left-hand corner of the screen is the ever-familiar Windows logo so if you’re use to the Windows Mobile menu system it is easy enough to access and via a one-touch button on the face of the smartphone. The Palm Treo Pro runs Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional. It comes with mobile editions of Excel, One Note, PowerPoint, Word and Internet Explorer. We were also able to use Exchange to sync the smartphone with Google Calendar and Contacts. In addition to GPS features for navigation there’s also plenty to keep you entertained such as the inclusion of Sprint TV.

Messaging: The Palm Treo Pro handles POP3 and IMAP 4 e-mail accounts as well as Web mail accounts (AOL, Yahoo, Gmail) with ease. You can set the Palm Treo Pro to check for messages at specific intervals, or you can check them manually at any time. For corporate users, the Palm Treo Pro also includes Microsoft’s Direct Push Technology for real-time e-mail delivery and automatic synchronization with your Outlook calendar, tasks, and contacts via Exchange Server. It comes with Windows Live Messenger, but other instant messaging apps aren’t available out-of-the-box. That said, you can download it from the Programs menu.

Camera/video: The Palm Treo Pro sports a 2-megapixel camera that can take photos and record short videos. It has zoom, but lacks a flash and a tiny mirror near the lens for snapping self-portraits. Also, there isn’t a dedicated camera key on the Palm Treo Pro, so if you take a lot of pictures you might want to manually dedicate a key to launch the feature. About that camera, we were usually able to capture spur of the moment events because the shutter doesn’t have a large lag time. There are a quite few features included: such as sports mode, panoramic, contact photos (take a picture and automatically save it as a contact in the phone book), and burst mode (captures a sequence of up to 30 still images). There are a few settings, as well, including resolution, white balance, brightness, self-timer, metering, special effects (sepia or grayscale). We should note that pictures are preformatted as a a square – essentially the same shape as the smartphone’s display. As for image quality, we were impressed with the quality both on screen and downloaded to a computer. We found colors to be vivid and the images clear and sharp.

You can also take videos with this cell phone, too. There’s even a Multimedia Message mode, where you can set the camera to send the video you’re about to capture. Video quality is pretty good and images really only blur when you shake the camera phone.

Music: The Palm Treo Pro sports an MP3 player. The smartphone comes with about 256MB of available internal memory, so you can store quite a few songs (at least a few albums' worth of tunes) and pictures on the cell phone. If you want more storage, we recommend buying an optional MicroSD media card, as this cell phone will support up to a 32GB MicroSD card. You can play MP3s, Microsofts WMA and Apple’s AACs audio files on the MP3 player. As noted, the audio quality is decent through the Palm’s speaker. You can also set the music to pause when you’re using another application or let the music play in the background. The Palm Treo Pro doesn’t have many audio-centric controls such as the ability to manually adjust bass and treble, however you can Shuffle, Repeat All or just one song, and create playlists on-the-fly. You can get music on to the Palm Treo Pro either by synching with Windows Media Player on a PC or visiting the Sprint Music store directly on the handset.

Connectivity/Bluetooth/WiFi/IR: The Palm Treo Pro is a connectivity dream and it has a Connectivity Manager program that makes it a dream to use. For starters, the smartphone has IR for beaming contact and other information to other IR-enabled devices. This has always been a feature found on Palm devices and we’re happy to see it still available in this model. It also has WiFi, so you can connect to a local WiFi network and surf the web or check e-mail without using the Sprint 3G data network. Another nice feature is the one-touch button on the spine of the Palm smartphone that allows you to quickly turn on and off WiFi. Finally, on the top of the device is a way to turn on or off all wireless features. Great for use on a plane. It also has Bluetooth. On that note, we were able to pair the Palm Treo Pro with a MotoRokr T505 Bluetooth In- Car Speakerphone. We found call quality to be acceptable with the device. And callers had no idea we were using a the portable speakerphone let alone a cell phone.

Design

Look and feel: The Palm Treo Pro is a decidedly attractive smartphone, with its shiny black plastic casing and slightly rounded edges. It feels nice in the hand and fits well in the pocket – although, occasionally, the back cover would fall off the cell phone when it was stored there. It really wasn’t a big deal, especially when you consider that’s where the MicroSD slot is located – though it’s still hot swappable (read: you don’t have to remove the battery or turn off the smartphone to change the MicroSD card). The cell phone feels comfortable in the hand, fitting just right so that you can still easily maneuver through the Palm Treo Pro’s features one handed if you so desire. There’s a stylus that slides into the side of the Palm Treo Pro that we’re happy to report we rarely had to use on the touchscreen. It seem to have just the right sensitivity setup out-of-the-box. About that display, it’s definitely sharp and vibrant. Though we should note it’s hard to view the screen in direct sunlight.

Keypad: The keys are a lot like those found on the Palm Centro , which means they are a bit on the small side. We did wish the space bar was; well, a bit more spacious. However, we did find that typing messages using the keyboard was acceptable, even for those with larger fingers.

Battery Life

In the battery life department, the Palm Treo Pro could be better, but it’s acceptable for a smartphone. Our biggest gripe with the phone is that it has a hard time charging away from the outlet. Although, you can technically charge it by connecting it to an active computer via USB or an USB-enabled car charger, in our tests it didn’t do much. The good news is that when you do connect the Treo Pro to the wall charger, it charges quickly. We found that the smartphone could last about two days before recharging when using the Palm Treo Pro regularly to make calls, occasionally surf the wireless Web, listen to music, and send/receive text messages. Users who barely use the cell phone to make/receive calls and send/receive messages can probably last about three days before needing to recharge, while heavier cell phone users will likely need to charge the Treo Pro nightly just to be on the safe side.