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Palmone Treo 650
Price: £199 with contract

Features
Performance
Ease of use
Value for money
Overall

Reviewed By: Andy Shaw

This review updated: 04/07/2005
Featured in magazine:
Issue 111
Manufacturer Contacts:
Supplier: PalmOne
Tel: 0118 974 2700
Web Address: http://euro.palmone.com/uk


There was a time when, if you wanted to get the most out of your gadgets, you had to carry one of everything – mobile phone, PDA and digital camera – and it was by no means easy to connect them to the net to browse the web or check your email. The Treo 650 is taking a step closer to bringing all this together, but is it close enough?

Features
The list of features on this phone is as long as your arm. Obviously you can use this as a standard mobile telephone, with the added bonus of a qwerty keyboard to speed up texting. The big, bright screen means you can also connect to the internet for web browsing and emailing, again aided by the keyboard. It's also a PDA, running Palm's versatile handheld operating system, so you can organise your day and keep your contacts to hand (and of course contact them using the device's communication tools). Then there's all those little extras – take photos with the VGA (0.3 megapixel) camera, connect to your computer or other devices using Bluetooth, or play music from SD memory cards.

Performance
The Treo works excellently both as a phone and as a PDA. The touch-screen is crisp and clear, while Blazer, the web browser included on the device, does a great job of shrinking standard websites to fit on a smaller screen. Although individual elements like the camera aren't going to replace their fully-featured standalone equivalents, this is a convenient way of carrying a lot of functions in one gadget.

Ease of use
Ease of use is vital in a complex device like this and we'd have to admit that PalmOne has gone out of its way to ensure the software is easy to use. Anyone who has used a Palm device before will find the stylus-driven touch-screen perfectly familiar, while the qwerty thumb keyboard makes emailing and texting that bit quicker. Both methods of input are integrated so you can use them simultaneously, depending on which is likely to do the best job. Even the set-up procedure has been streamlined, with settings for some of the most popular ISPs and email accounts pre-loaded on the device to make connecting to the net simple.

Value for money
The phone is available now without a contract for around £450 (Amazon.co.uk is offering them for £455.28) – a lot to pay, even for a phone of this calibre. Orange is discounting this to £199.99 if you commit to a mid-level 12-month contract. It's still a lot of money, but this is a cutting-edge device.

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