Digital Trends

Palm Treo 750 March 20th, 2007 | by Stewart Wolpin

Testing and Use

Once you manage to find and figure out how everything works -- everything works…sort of. The Voice quality on the 750 was reported as clear-and-clean at the receiving end but was a bit thick and muddy at our end, and it lacked the piercing volume necessary for hearing through noisy environments. Ringtone volume is barely loud enough to hear if your phone is in a pant pocket, pocketbook or bag. But there is a handy speaker mute switch on the top of the 750, which lets you quiet the phone without drilling through menus.

We had frustrating problems with Bluetooth. We managed to pair some stereo Bluetooth headphones, but either couldn't get them to work or, if we got them to work once, couldn't figure out how to get them to work again. Once successfully paired, we could skip tracks and pause tracks from the headphones -- we just couldn't hear them. Paired headphones appeared on the paired item list, but tapping or selecting them merely gave you the opportunity of modifying its settings rather than activating the connection. This may have been an issue with the Bluetooth radio in our test unit, but caveat emptor. Fortunately, the phone also is equipped with a 2.5mm stereo jack for connected wired headphones.

The 750's 1.3 MP camera performed as well as can be expected. There was minimal shutter lag, indoor pictures in moderate light were well lit if lacking in crisp colors and blacks, but most shots were marred by nearly unavoidable camera motion blur. All par for the cell cam course.

Battery standby time with the usual power saving modes on (short backlight time, quick unused phone off time) is measured in weeks rather than days or hours, but actual talk time fell a bit short of the rated four hours.

We were surprised by the supposedly speedy UMTS service. In informal side-by-side speed tests, an EDGE-enabled Blackberry 8700c filled Web pages nearly twice as fast as the vaunted UMTS-powered 750. We obviously expected the opposite result, or at least equal speed to an EDGE device given the vagaries of any cell network.