Digital Trends

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

Features and Design

The 750 is a quad-band EDGE phone operating in worldwide 850/900/1800/1900 bands, and in the 850/1900/2100 frequencies for the high-speed 3G UMTS service. UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) is the successor to GSM and serves as a foundation for Cingular's HSDPA network, which provides roughly twice to three times the capacity and speed. In the real world, that means more data coming through the pipe faster, enabling greased lightning downloads of A/V content such as streaming video, music tracks, games and ringtones. Cingular plans on offering a firmware upgrade to HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access), but there has been no formal timing announcement as of this writing. In all events, the 750's UMTS/HSDPA capabilities give it an edge (no pun intended) over the EDGE-only iPhone, although that may not be quite the handicap it might appear on the surface. More on this in a minute.

In addition to the UMTS/HSDPA capabilities, the 750 is packed with the usual Chinese menu of QWERTY Smartphone and Windows Mobile 5.0 attributes and abilities including full Microsoft push/pull mail and application compatibility, full messaging capabilities, the ability to open MS application attachments, as well as multimultimedia capabilities. But the 750 is like Las Vegas: it's filled with wonders but hard to get around.

Unlike most other non-Smartphone cells, the 750 lacks external application-specific or control buttons. There are no instant access keys for the camera, for the music player, nothing. You are entirely reliant on the clumsy Windows Mobile 5.0 interface to get at and control anything. For some reason, the version of Windows Mobile 5.0 on the 750 differs from the Windows Mobile 5.0 on the Samsung Blackjack and the Motorola Q. These latter two devices include a row of frequently accessed apps on the home screen that enable almost instant access via their scroll wheel controls. On the 750 however, your six last used apps are posted as tiny icons at the top of the "Start" pull-down menu. This means you are at least two screen taps away, and usually more, from just finding an application, much less firing it up. All apps are presented via tappable icons in folders accessed thru "Programs" under the familiar Microsoft "Start" menu.

Sans stylus -- if you're forced to use one hand to operate the phone because the other hand is holding a briefcase, sandwich, makeup applicator, newspaper or magazine, commuter train strap or, shame on you, steering wheel -- you're forced to use the standard step-by-step scroll scroll scroll scroll/select/scroll scroll scroll scroll/select NEWS navigation method. This manual navigation increases the time for finding, launching and using apps by a factor of four, if not more.

Physically, the handsome silver and black Treo is a quarter inch less wide than the Blackberry 8700c, but this is not necessarily a good thing. The last thing you want on a Smartphone is less room for the QWERTY keyboard. The keypad on the same-sized 680 has slightly smaller keys but more space between the keys than the 750, meaning you're less prone to hit a neighboring button. Like the 680, the 750 has an integrated antenna, which means when it's belt-clipped, there'll be no surprising jabs in the love handles when you sit down.

The 750's 2.5-inch diagonal LCD screen is plenty bright. But the screen's vertical portrait shape is anachronistic in an increasingly widescreen video age. The necessary video letterboxing will become more of an issue once Cingular Video is available via HSDPA. By comparison, the Samsung Blackjack has a slightly higher resolution 4:3 2.2-inch screen.

Finally, some gear heads bemoan the 750's lack of WiFi. In a broadband wireless network world, WiFi is not only unnecessary but a detriment since it sucks power like a black hole sucks matter.

Image Courtesy of Palm