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Palm Treo 680, the smartphone for consumers.

Posted by John P • February 13, 2007 • Printer-friendly • Feed • Share

Treo680 0 Palm Treo 680, the smartphone for consumers.

Since the first Treo was introduced by Handspring a couple of years ago, Palm has been spearheading the smartphone industry with the most popular line of smartphones to date. This month, I had the chance to test out the Treo 680.

The Treo 680 from Palm is a Palm OS-based smartphone with a VGA-quality digital camera/camcorder, a full QWERTY keyboard, and a great, bright screen. The 680 is available in four colors, graphite, arctic, copper, and crimson; while the version sold from Cingular comes in graphite only. The Treo 680 is the first Treo to rid of the antenna "stub" on top of the device, and replace it with an internal antenna, making it more appealing.

The Palm Treo 680 comes with a rechargeable battery, AC power charger, USB sync cable, a headset, stylus, Palm software CD, and a user's guide. Setting up the device was easy, just turn it on, install the software, and plug it into your PC or Mac.

Palm claims that the Treo 680 receives 4 hours of talk time and up to 300 hours of standby time, while I found that the battery drained overnight, or in some cases, within a few hours. Palm recently fixed this issue with a fix, but at the time of testing, this fix was not available.

Although the keyboard does look a bit cramped, it is actually quite comfortable when typing with both thumbs, and single-handedly. The screen was bright, easy to read, and it's middle (and default) setting was too bright; I had to turn it down to save battery life.

Call quality was excellent on the Treo 680 and the speakerphone was audible enough that it could be placed in the middle of a conference room for a conference call.

The Treo 680's camera was okay in quality and in low-light conditions was grainy like most VGA-quality cameras, so if you're looking for a great camera phone and smartphone combined; this is not what you should buy. The delay between pressing the record button and beginning to capture video was quite annoying as the built-in microphone picked up the beeping noise every time a video was captured.

The Palm Treo 680 is an EDGE device, and the speed of web browsing was not the fastest, but faster than most other smartphones on the EDGE or older GPRS network.

Overall, the Palm Treo 680 is Palm's first foray into the consumer market with smartphones, and it is one of the best smartphones to be looking at if you are in the market. The Palm Treo 680 is available today for $199 with a 2 year contract from Cingular, and $399 unlocked from Palm Direct.

Pros

  • Bright display.
  • Great call quality and speakerphone.
  • Decent web browsing speeds.
  • Excellent keyboard.

Cons

  • Sub-par battery life.
  • Colors only available on Cingular version.
  • Delay between capturing video and pressing record button.

Final Verdict
3.5 out of 5 stars



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