Treo 650 Review - Part 2

It's been almost 3 weeks since I got my Treo 650. I am continuing my review in bits and pieces. This time, I will focus on the communications aspects. The "smartphone" concept is a convergence between two different tools : the PDA (personal digital assistant) and the mobile phone. Companies from both ends of the spectrum (e.g. palmOne, from the PDA world and Nokia, from the mobile phone world) are introducing their own smartphones with varying degrees of success. In most cases, it's very difficult to balance between the "phone" and the "PDA". The Treo 650 works well enough as a phone - and it's very easy to use. There are dedicated "Call" (Green) and "Hang Up" (Red) hardware buttons which are common on almost any mobile phone. The Phone application is a simple yet clever combination of a normal phone keypad and an application launcher. You can easily see your battery life, your signal strength (including GPRS availability) and Bluetooth status. Voice quality is fair. The speakerphone is not loud, mainly because the speaker is at the back of the unit. I use DiGi as my service provider, and all the settings were automatically loaded upon startup. In the SIM Services application, it detected the djuice service: The data services (GPRS/EDGE) were also automatically detected, with zero configuration on my side : EDGE support is excellent where I am: Blazer is a solid web browser - if a bit schizophrenic. It's called Web in Applications, but when it opens up it's called Blazer. palmOne has used many different browsers in their various devices in the past that it's hard to keep track. All that aside, Blazer renders text and images well - and like the name, it really is fast. These are the various Applications that I've grouped into the Communications category: In the next part of the review, I will talk about Messaging (SMS, MMS, Email and Chat). You can get your own Treo 650 at your local retailer or from Amazon. Tags: Treo Palm Smartphone