Palm Treo 700W PDA Phone (CDMA, Bluetooth, 1.3MP, 128MB, SDIO/MMC)

Reviewed by: LouisS

Duration of ownership: 10 Months

Strengths: Keeps me in touch with every Verizon employee in tech support

Weaknesses: This space isn't large enough. Poor battery life, freezes at any time, can't respond to voicemail when screen changes back to Today, won't play ringtones when call comes in, turns off phone by itself, aaaarggghh.

Overall Evaluation: I am on my 4th Treo 700w. Yes, my 4th. I have been begging them to switch me to a Blackberry since June but they insist on just replacing my bad Treo with another one to cause me heartburn. My first was in January just when they came out. It took 2 weeks to go silent. #2 was really nasty but improved when the service pack came out, but then went back to dropped calls, not letting me answer calls, freezing up, etc. #3 in June finally fried itself this past week in October after providing much entertainment in what it wouldn't do each day. Dropped calls, freezing up, couldn't respond to voicemail, would play ringtones in setup but not when phone rang, etc. My wife and partner pleaded with me to pay for a Blackberry if Verizon refused to switch me for free. I have to wait till January to get the discount from $470 to $300 for the Blackberry, so I am stuck with Treo #4 in the meantime. The best part is when I am in the Verizon store telling the techs about my problems and someone with a brand new Treo is listening to my horror stories. They are like deer in headlights, realizing they just signed up for the biggest headache in their lifetime. Oh yeah, tech support. I had a 1 Gb SD card in phone #2. Tech support told me that having that card in there corrupted the operating system of the phone so it wasn't their fault. I never installed any ringtones, programs or other 3rd party software. All I used was the default phone software. Yet they claimed that a storage device corrupted the operating system? I left the SD card out of phone #3 and it fried itself anyway. I do remember that when tech support told me that having so many Treo's go bad must be the way I was using it. I asked them if I should wear an aluminum foil hat just to be safe and they said it couldn't hurt.