Treo 700w Review 45
bart_scriv writes "Business Week has a review of Palm's Treo 700w (the first Palm device to run Windows). Aside from network performance, the reviewer was fairly disappointed. From the article: 'The best Windows Mobile device ever, but a cut below Palm's 650."
Better Together? (Score:4, Interesting)
It just may be that the dream of creating an all-in-one device isn't ready to be realized. Or maybe the dream is misplaced. Perhaps people will carry a collection of small, lightweight devices like Treos, T/Xs, and iPods, all of which are optimized for different tasks. We'll grab one from the shelf or the drawer when we leave the house based on what we plan to do that day, just as we would pick our socks or belt.
I have an iPod, a Palm TX and a bluetooth cellphone and enjoy each device for how well it does its respective task. I had thought about switching to a Treo 650 in an effort to replace the three devices I carry with me daily, but I don't think I'm ready yet. I agree with the authors of this article that there are very good MP3 players, very good organizers, and good phones, and to find them all in the same package is a bit unrealistic (at least, for now).
When the "holy grail" of mobile devices arrives, I will probably only buy one if it offers me the same high quality experience that my seperate solutions do now.
Windows won't support the sharper image - WHATEVER (Score:4, Interesting)
OK, I am no WinMo 5.0 fanboy by any means (OK, so I used to catchy shortened form) but the statement that it won't support a higher res because Windows can't is full of CRAP. Not that I expect BW.com to get the facts right, but come on - the last thing we nerds need is one more PHB convinced of something based on bad journalism!
Comment about "web performance" amusing (Score:4, Interesting)
Imagine a browser that switches to a "simple" mode for any page over 200k. That's absurd. Imagine a browser that takes 35-40 seconds to render some pages - while locking the device. That's Blazer.
PIE isn't exactly a great web browser, but it's sure a hell of a lot better than Blazer. And you can also choose Opera, NetFront, or Minimo on Windows Mobile - the alternatives for Palm OS are generally few and far between.
Also, the 240x240 screen size isn't a limitation of Windows Mobile; there are WM devices with 640x480 and 320x240 screens.
Having owned the Treo 650, I never understood why everyone loved it so much - my device crashed frequently (always requiring a soft-reset; WM devices sometimes "bog down" but rarely lock), had a crappy USB/power connector (the Palm design is frankly garbage - it relies on the tension of plastic clips to hold the connector together), had a quiet earpiece (though this was fixable with 3rd-party software), and had a number of interesting "quirks" that made it unusable as a video/gaming system (1px white border around the screen - all the time, practically impossible to allocate more than 2-4MB of memory).