Palm Palm Treo 680

Reviewed by: jbrainard

Duration of ownership:

Strengths: It is an ok phone, and the PDA does very basic things adequately

Weaknesses: Palm has destroyed much functionality that was in their OS.

Overall Evaluation: Pros: Palm OS for PDA. Palm has compromised their PDA features ... (see revised comments below)The Phone seems generally quite good. I have no use for the email or web browsing and I have no opinion on how well they work on this smartphone. There is no WiFi, even though Palm has it on their high end PDA.Specifics: Battery life is ok, but not nearly as good as some stand alone phones I have used, including really cheap Motorolas which have exceptionally long battery life. Palm needs to partner with some company that has already figured out how to build a phone that doesn't suck the battery dry so quickly. Screen is nice and is visible in bright light, but a notch below the best. PDA can be a tad slow sometimes, so you just can't go wild pushing buttons. The 5 way button did not work properly at first, but it seems to be fine now after some use. Tone quality of calls at Treo 680 end lacks higher frequencies which makes understanding callers more difficult than is desirable. There is no excuse for this and Palm should again be embarrassed that it didn't get this right. Documentation is not the best and does not even describe some features that are on the phone, such as the screen keyboard (different from the dial pad on the screen)UPDATED on 5/2/08Now that I have used the phone a short while I have a much different and worse opinion of this device.I knew how good the old Palm OS was. The OS now used by Palm in the 680, and possibly its newer smart phones, is a screwed up version of what they had years ago. Too bad I didn't know this before purchasing. I used to like the Palm OS. But now I see that Palm has worked hard to destroy the usefulness of their OS. For example, in Contacts, there is no longer a compact listing form, but you must view all phone numbers for each entry on separate lines in the main listing. No choice. Also, if you are not careful about entries, and put a word description with a phone number, you will just get a blank line, unless you put the description after the number. But even then you will not see any user entered descriptor. For example, if you have two home numbers, one for Dad and one for Mom, you can see that description information only if you go to the edit page. On the old OS if you selected a listing, you got to see every none empty cell of information. Now you have to go to the edit screen and scroll through all the blank lines to see, for example, anything in "custom" entries. Palm had the OS right, but then messed it up badly. Finally, if you press a letter, such as "J" to see all the last name listings that start with "J", in alphabetical order, you are out of luck. It finds every bloody listing entry with a "J", whether it is first name, last and gosh knows what, that you have to scroll through. The older OS did it sensibly and returned an alphabetical listing of last names starting with "J". But it looks like Palm has fired any developer with an IQ over 2 digits, and they have made the expected "improvements." You will also find similar stupid changes in the Calendar. For example, you could in the old OS hit an entry for 9am on a particular day and it would start an appointment with 9 am as the default entry for start time. Now it doesn't. But enough. You might as well use some other OS. Palm has ruined theirs. It is one thing to design a poor OS from the start, and then work to improve it, but when you have a good one to start with, it takes real stupidity to ruin it.