Palm's new Treo 680 a great upgrade

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 22 November 2006 13:18

Your IT - Entertainment

The new 680 is a GSM, GPRS and EDGE phone, with EDGE being a 2.75G technology that is supposed to deliver at least 100kbps speeds, at least double the speed of GPRS. EDGE should go even faster than that, with figures of around 150kbps quoted. Interestingly, EDGE is available in many places now, even Australia, and it’s been happening at a time when 3G and 3.5G networks have been rolled out.

Of course the Treo 680 remains a very easy to use smartphone with organizer, email, web browsing, calendar, contacts, mp3 player, video player and much more, with a built-in keyboard that seems streets ahead of anyone else’s.

While the Palm OS still only lets you do one task at a time, the Treo still offers one of the most user friendly mobile phone interfaces out there, with everything fully accessible by the keyboard and associated buttons, all with your thumb – you never need to take the stylus out if you don’t want to.

The design has been improved, with the stub of an antenna removed at last as it’s now internal. The unit is slightly smaller all round than the previous Treo 650, but only just. Still, without that stub it looks much more streamlined.

One incredibly important update has been the change of the position of the SD card. On the 650, the SD card was placed at the top of the phone. This proved to be a fantastic place to lose the card from, especially as there was no cover to keep in hidden and in place. Now the SD card slot is behind a very sturdy yet easily openable cover, and this has been placed on the right hand side of the phone. Stories of lost SD cards should be a thing of the past.

Importantly, the Treo 650 still uses an SD format. While Mini-SD and MicroSD cards are common on other phones, I’ve always thought this was a bit stupid. Of course it’s done to take up less space on the phone, but c’mon. It can’t be that hard to squeeze in everything else around it. Palm have kept the SD card on the Treo 680 to make life much, much easier for Treo 650 users who will decide to upgrade, of which there will likely be very many.

Calls you can’t answer can now be responded to with a pre-set text message. Other features include a new even faster Blazer browser, now at version 4.5, thanks to smarter caching capabilities and more. 64Mb of user-available storage is built into the 680, making that almost three times greater than the capacity of the Treo 650. The SD card slot can also handle SD cards up to 2Gb in size.

Enhanced email and messaging means that Exchange ActiveSync will now synchronise not only calendar and email, but contacts as well, with SMS and MMS capabilities improved for a better user experience. 

A new version of Documents To Go has been included, so you can view, edit and share Word and Excel documents, as well as read PDF files and view Powerpoint presentations.

The Treo 680 also has improved car-kit and headset support, and support for multiple simultaneous Bluetooth connections using the Bluetooth 1.2 standard. About the only thing the Palm doesn't have is Wi-Fi, although a Wi-Fi SDIO card could be used if you really wanted Wi-Fi capabilities.

All in all, it’s an impressive new version of the Palm OS Treo, and a good alternative to all the Windows Pocket PC devices out there, even Palm’s own Treo 700W, which runs on Windows Moible 5.0.

Aimed at existing users who love the Treo 650, along with anyone looking for a great mobile email experience, or just a great mobile phone, existing fans will quickly snap this new model up and will tell others of their experiences, causing Palm to gain even more fans, whether they opt to buy the Palm OS or Windows Mobile version.

As for Blackberry, the next 12 months is crucial. Yes, they’ve launched the new Pearl, but they are facing competition from every corner – Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Palm, Samsung, HP, iMate, O2 and the rest.

Whichever way you look at it, the age of excellent mobile email is here, wrapped up in some fantastic little mobile devices that gives Apple’s sales figures for the musical iPod a run for its money.