Palm Treo 750

Palm's new Treo 750 for Cingular is a damned good phone. It's one of the clearest-sounding smartphones I've ever used, and Palm's unique features make it easier to find contacts, make calls, and search the Web than on most other Windows Mobile cells. Yet in an intensely competitive marketplace, I have trouble summoning up unabashed enthusiasm for this chubby, somewhat overpriced device.

There's nothing outrageously new about the Treo 750's features, but that's okay—the cell-phone world needs not only innovators, but also refiners who make the innovations usable. That's always been Palm's role, and the company is good at it.

Just as the Treo 680 looks like a Treo 650 with the antenna lopped off, the Treo 750 looks just like a Treo 700w with the antenna missing—which also looks like a Treo 680, or a Treo 650, or any other Treo you may have seen in the past two years. There are good and bad sides to this. The Treo is a solid, friendly weight in your hand, with a smooth case and relatively clear buttons—though the keys are small and close together. But modern designs seem to have passed the Treo by a bit—you'll find that other smartphones either have bigger screens, thinner bodies, or more fluid navigation devices, such as trackballs.

Still, this is a great phone. Call quality and volume are absolutely terrific, some of the best I've heard in a long time. And the quad-band radio is able to hit even higher-speed UMTS networks in foreign countries. Admittedly, when you turn the speakerphone all the way up, the whole phone vibrates, causing a buzzing sound. But in a world where too many smartphones are too quiet, the Treo 750 is quite refreshing. Reception is pretty good too; my 750 was able to hold onto calls with a weak Cingular signal. It connected to a Plantronics Bluetooth headset without a problem, but you can't initiate voice dialing from a Bluetooth headset—a major annoyance. I couldn't measure talk time adequately because I tested the Treo 750 primarily in a weak-signal location, but the 7 hours of PDA usage time with full backlighting is good for a modern PDA phone.

The 750 is also a smartphone, of course, with a touch screen and connections to Cingular's UMTS network. It can't hit the heights of Cingular's HSDPA speeds, like the Cingular 8525 and the Samsung BlackJack can—it's earthbound, at about 384-Kbps downloads—but my tests showed that the 750 makes the best of what it has, coming close to maxing out UMTS speeds. It works as a modem for your laptop over either USB or Bluetooth, and Palm has said it will have an HSDPA software upgrade within the next six months to bump up speeds.

Palm has touched up the Windows Mobile system here and there to make it easier to use, and all of the innovations are smart. You can search your contacts list or Google right from the home screen, send text messages to callers you're ignoring, or see text messages in an attractive, IM-like threaded way.

The 750's low-res screen and 300-MHz processor combine to make it feel pretty snappy. The device was moderately fast on the benchmark tests, and the built-in Picsel viewer is unusually good at displaying complex PDFs. There's a relatively roomy 63MB of free storage memory, just like on the Sprint Treo 700wx, and a miniSD card slot that supports up to 2GB cards. The Treo comes with all the usual Windows Mobile software, too, including Pocket Office and Windows Media Player, and you can listen to music on wireless stereo Bluetooth headphones. The built-in 1.3-megapixel camera isn't all that good—photos looked a bit out of focus—but the camera phone mode takes unusually smooth videos at 176-by-144 and 30 frames per second.

Palm has made three errors that imperil the Treo 750, however.

First, there's the screen. As on the Treo 700w, Palm used a low 240-by-240 resolution—showing 25 percent fewer pixels than competing phones such as the Cingular 8525 and Samsung BlackJack, half as many as its own Treo 680, and even fewer than the diminutive BlackBerry Pearl, which the portly Treo could eat for lunch without bulging further. This affects everything you do. It means you see less of a Web page, fewer contacts, fewer calendar entries, and less of your Microsoft Office documents. It also completely screws up some Pocket PC applications that expect a rectangular 320-by-240 screen, so content runs off the edges. That said, the Palm's screen looks good: In full sunlight, it's completely readable. But you can't view something that's off the edge of the screen.

Second, the price is steep. The new sweet spot for consumer-ish smart phones is $199, as shown by the Samsung BlackJack, the Motorola Q, the Treo 680, and others. A $399 price (much more without a new contract) puts the Treo 750 in the company of the Cingular 8525 and other bigger, more powerful devices oriented toward power users. Yet the Treo isn't power user oriented. In fact, it's designed to let you get at popular features easily.

Third, I have a problem with the shape. Small and thin is in. Compared with the BlackJack (4.4 by 2.3 by 0.8 inches, at 5.4 ounces), the Treo looks like a boat. At $199, that would be acceptable. At $399, well . . . you get the picture.

The new Treo 750 is a very good phone and basic connected PDA. It's an even better phone than the Treo 680. But its high price and small screen make me reluctant to recommend it over the Treo 680, the Samsung BlackJack, and the BlackBerry Pearl on the one side and the Cingular 8525 on the other.

SPEC DATA :

• Service Provider: AT&T
• Operating System: Windows Mobile Pocket PC
• Screen Size: 2.5 inches
• Screen Details: 240x240 65k-color TFT display
• Camera: Yes
• Megapixels: 1.3 MP
• Flash Memory Type: Mini-Secure Digital
• Bluetooth: Yes
• Web Browser: Yes
• Network: GSM, UMTS, UMTS
• Bands: 850, 900, 1800, 1900, 2100
• High-Speed Data: GPRS, EDGE, UMTS
• Special Features: Music