Treo 650 Review : Part 3

Continuing my review of the palmOne Treo 650 smartphone. Read Part 1 and Part 2 first. Having unlimited GPRS/EDGE service is a double-edged sword. One one hand, I am productive anytime, anywhere. On the other hand, it's very difficult to "slow down". The freedom and power while on the move is intoxicating, and extremely addictive. I can't help but check my email at every opportunity, and my list of mobile bookmarks grows by the day. By power I mean I don't need to have the most powerful computer in the palm of my hand - only access to it. I have remote access applications on my Treo (e.g. ptelnet, VNC) if I need to do something myself, and SMS, IM, email and web access if I need someone else to do it. On the "Phone" part of the smartphone, PalmOne has been slowly evolving their application suite over the past several generations of PDAs. This is why you have many different browsers on the palmOne PDAs, including Web Browser Pro and Blazer. Both my TT3 and Zire72 had email, SMS and Web applications, and the Zire72 also added an MMS application. The Treo650 sports a combined SMS/MMS messaging app called Messaging, which is well integrated with the camera and address book. It's a pretty seamless process to take a photo or capture a video, add a sound recording and send it out via MMS. Both sending and receiving MMS worked "out of the box" for me. For SMS, it has a "threaded message/chat-like interface" for those back and forth SMS conversations. This makes it easy to communicate with several people at one time. I'm a heavy user of email. My corporate email address is forwarded to my Gmail account and I download all my messages to Versamail. I have used many different versions of Versmail, even back in the old Multimail days. The latest version is 3.0B, which is similar to its predecessors. There is an option to sync/download your email from as often as every 5 minutes. I discovered soon enough that this was a mistake, because an "always on" GPRS connection seriously drains your battery life. Versamail can download attachments, and Word and Excel files can be opened natively by Documents To Go. Conclusion for Communications Overall, I am quite impressed with the communications abilities of the Treo 650. I would consider it a real smartphone, as opposed to a PDA with phone functions attached to it or vice versa. Because the applications are in various stages of maturity and integration, they do not have a consistent user interface. For example, "Disconnect" is in different menu locations for Versamail and Blazer. Unless they change web browsers again, I would expect to see a streamlined interface in the next version of the Treo. Top on my wish list is an integrated Communications suite ala the Psion Series 5/7 - an all-in-one email, SMS/MMS, IM and fax application. Tags: Treo Palm Smartphone