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The Treo 650 from Sprint combines the venerable Palm operating system with a nicely designed handset that includes a fairly usable QWERTY keyboard and a vibrant display. It's not perfect--some design quirks and a high price are among its drawbacks--but there's an awful lot to like here.
The first thing you'll notice about the 650--which has been around since late 2004--is its excellent 2.5-inch (diagonal) 320-by-320-resolution display. The touch-sensitive screen's crisp rendering enables the familiar Palm icons to pop off the screen, and it makes reading everything from Web pages to e-mail messages reasonably easy.
The unit's small keys aren't exactly comfortable to type on, but they suffice for punching in quick e-mail responses. You can also use the stylus and an on-screen keyboard; unfortunately, Palm's familiar handwriting-recognition software doesn't come installed.
In addition to Palm's old standby apps such as Calender, Contacts, and VersaMail, you'll find features like a Real Media player, a Pics and Video player, a 0.3-megapixel camera, and a camcorder. Palm's Blazer browser is included, too, although Sprint's sluggish data rates make browsing a painfully slow experience.
As a phone, the Treo works quite well. It offers good sound quality, and it fits comfortably in your hand. There's no avoiding the smudge factor of holding the screen against your face, but that's hardly a deal breaker.
The Treo 650's greatest weaknesses involve hardware limitations. For starters, it has a ridiculously small amount of accessible memory. With this model Palm moved from dynamic RAM to Flash memory, which means that you won't lose your data if the unit's battery dies. But as a result of the switch, the Treo 650 has just 32MB of memory total--and only 23MB of that is user accessible. Other shortcomings are the unit's lack of built-in Wi-Fi and its undistinguished talk-time battery life of 5 hours, 32 minutes.
Finally, there's the price. Our test unit, from Sprint, sells for $500 (as of April 7, 2006, with a two-year contract). That means the Treo 650 carries roughly the same price tag as a value-priced desktop PC. Carrier rebates bring that price down a bit, but it's still a sizeable investment. That said, you'd be hard pressed to carry your value desktop on the train so you could respond to e-mail messages during your morning commute.
Tom Mainelli
