palmOne Treo 650 PDA Phone (Unlocked) The unlocked PalmOne Treo 650 boasts all the legendary features of the venerable Treo 600, plus a whole lot more. Now with Bluetooth, a higher resolution screen, a removable battery, and an improved keyboard, the Treo 650 is once again on the cutting edge of Smartphone technology. It offers all the functionality of a high-end Palm OS-powered PDA, a cell phone and a VGA camera. Simply put, it’s the ultimate mobile office companion.
Design
 Click the image to get a closer look at the Treo 650’s features. |
Under the hood, the Treo 650 features Palm OS 5.4, 32MB of RAM (23MB available for end user storage), and an Intel PXA270 312 MHz processor. The design retains the same popular form factor as the Treo 600 with a few subtle, yet significant, changes. The unit’s screen has been dramatically enhanced to support 320 x 320 resolution and the full QWERTY keypad has been redesigned for greater ease of use. The top of the unit features an expansion card slot for SD and MMC-based memory and expansion cards. There’s also an infrared port here for line of sight data transfers, as well as a handy switch for turning off the phone’s ringer. A five-way navigator controls most of the phone’s menus and operating system functions, while quick application buttons on either side of the navigator get you to your favorite applications in a snap. The left side of the unit features a volume up/down toggle plus a handy user-customizable button that can be assigned to any phone or PDA function. The rear of the Treo 650 houses a loudspeaker, as well as the VGA (640×480) camera unit. A touchscreen stylus can be tucked away on the right side of the phone. Meanwhile, a combined charging, data, and accessory attachment port is housed on the bottom of the unit, as is a standard 2.5 mm stereo headset jack.
Calling and PDA Features
All the of the Treo 650’s phone and PDA functions are designed to provide an integrated, seamless experience. For instance, you can type in the name or initials of a contact on the keypad to dial them. Or, use the touchscreen and stylus to copy information from an email and quickly paste it into another email or text message. All of the latest phone features folks expect are built-in, too, like a handsfree speakerphone, polyphonic ringtones, a vibrate mode and picture caller ID. The capacity of the unit’s address book is only limited by the amount of internal and expansion memory available. Use the Treo 650’s Bluetooth capability to wirelessly sync your contacts with your PC or Mac (yes, Mac!). Headsets, car kits and other wireless peripherals can also be paired with the unit via Bluetooth.
The Treo 650 is also a fully functional Palm OS device. That means that a huge library of applications, from spreadsheets to word processors to games, can be added to the Treo 650. It’s easy to perform multiple tasks like checking your calendar while talking on the phone or dialing calls directly from your contacts list. Familiar Palm OS software ships with the handset including calendar, calculator, clock, contacts, memo, and task management applications. Real Player for video and MP3 playback, VersaMail email client, and DataViz Documents to Go for mobile access to spreadsheets and text documents, are also included.
The unit’s memory expansion slot allows you to transfer music, photos, and video from your desktop. Or, use it to load additional games and applications.
Messaging and Internet
The device fully supports SMS and MMS messaging for rapid exchange of pictures, text and video. You can even get mobile email and web browsing. The Treo 650’s web browser supports full-size web pages, and you can enter secure pages with 128-bit SSL encryption. POP3 email accounts provided by SBC, BellSouth, Yahoo, Earthlink, Comcast and AT&T Worldnet are all compatible with the 650’s email client application. IMAP and Exchange-based email systems are also supported, and you can view photos, HTML, Word, Excel and PowerPoint attachments.
Vital Statistics
The PalmOne Treo 650 weighs 6.30 ounces and measures 4.40 x 2.30 x .90 inches. Its lithium-ion battery is rated at up to 6 hours of digital talk time, and up to 300 hours of digital standby time. It runs on the 800/900/1800/1900 GSM/GPRS frequencies. The phone comes with a one year limited warranty.
What’s in the Box
Treo 650 handset, lithium-ion battery, USB HotSync cable, headset, AC charger, user manual, software CD-ROM.
Customer Review: not perfect, but one of the BEST
The PalmOne Treo 650 is one of the best, if not the Best, Smartphones out there. I can do almost everything I want to on it. I can watch DVD movies (TPCMP) that Ive put on the SD storage card , I watch some TV with my MobiTV program, I can listen to MP3’s, streaming internet radio, podcasts (ptunes), and with my FM Transmitter (Belkin) plugged into the earphone (buy the 2mm to 3mm adapter)I can listen to all of those over any FM receiver such as the speakers in my car. I can send and receive email (chatteremail), entertain myself in waiting rooms with games, print (palmprint) to my bluetooth printer (HP 450cbi) , read books and html pages(isilo), send sms and mms messages, take pictures and small movies with the built in camcorder, Surf the web and unzip downloaded compressed files and programs.
The palm os is very stable and tons of programs are out there and many of them are freeware.
I suggest buying the PalmOne Bluetooth handsfree earpiece, PalmOne cradle, Seidio extended battery, and the auto charger.
-The best Ive ever had, and Ive had, baby!
Customer Review: Love it! Hate it!
Finally, a PDA, phone, and MP3 player all in one. And the Treo 650 delivers, if it weren’t for the bugs!
The Palm portions work as you’d expect, the screen is awesome, and it syncs with my Linux box faster and more reliably over Bluetooth (http://www.newt.com/debian/treo650.html). (So I don’t care much if the unit can’t read Microsucks documents.)
The system used to reset itself daily, or sometime require a manual reset when you couldn’t turn it off, or on, or when it hung. Most of these resets disappeared when I ran the dbScan software that comes with DateBk5 to remove deleted records. You can get the dbScan software from the DateBk5 site. I read another review here that the 1.20 firmware update helped the stability too. I’ll have to try it.
The VersaMail application as well as the Bluetooth and Network preferences pages have some usability issues. The VersaMail application reverted to factory defaults–losing my mail–twice over the past six months.
The Palm Wireless headset sometimes doesn’t pick up calls, but when it does, the sound appears to be pretty good. Wish I could turn up the volume more though. Sharing the same power cord with the Treo is a welcome feature.
The phone is surprisingly robust. It’s taken a lot of lickings and keeps on ticking. However, it took its last fall last week (and it was a beaut–it leaped out of its case while I was sprinting across a street) which rendered some of the phone operations inoperative. Tip: Don’t get the Covertec horizontal pouch case which rotates and dumps the phone nearly every time you get out of the car, or releases the phone when you run.
Someone mentioned that the text was hard to read. I’m over 40 and can read the crisp lettering just fine without my glasses. The keyboard is nice too: I could use Grafitti very well (I wrote a trip journal for two months in Grafitti!) but can type a whole lot faster and more accurately with the keyboard.
Despite the problems and well-deserved criticism with the phone, I will be replacing my dead unit with another 650. I don’t use the phone heavily, so if the 1.20 firmware update improves the stability, I will be content.