Handspring Treo 300 Handheld

Ok, I'm an early adopter and when the treo 300 came out for use on the Sprint network, I had to get it. In the past, I was using a Sprint Touchpoint phone which was about 2" x 1" x 1" and had the most intuitive phone menu around--making the standard for the Treo pretty high in terms of phone capability. On the PDA side, I was using a Palm V which, though without bells & whistles, is very easy to use.

So here's my breakdown in terms of pros/cons. Let's start with the pros:

1. Compact size. The Treo is essentially the same size as my palm V with perhaps an extra 1/2 inch of width. Regardless, you won't notice a difference in size when it's sitting in your pocket or holding it in your hand. Indeed, the extra width is for a very nice transparent, protective shield which serves to protect your device screen. In terms of design, the device has some nice innovations. The power button is easily accessed on the top of the Treo with a blinking light that tells you whether you are receiving phone signal or not. There is also a mute button that makes it easy to shut off the annoying ringer of the phone during a business meeting. Underneath the protective shield are the menu buttons (I'll get back to these in my "cons" section) which, generally speaking, are the same as in any palm device.

Lastly, there is a cogwheel on the side to allow for easier navigation through menus. That said, I found little advantage in using it vs the menu buttons and found it extraneous. However, if you are coming from a Sony clie, this might be nice for you.

2. Speakerphone. This is my favorite feature of the new phone. You basically flip open the shield (which also turns on the device or answers a phone call) and you can just sit the device down on your desk and start talking. In my experience, the quality is very good and as long as your background noise is minimal, you can easily talk using the speakerphone at least 1-2 feet away from your mouth.

3. Ease of setup. The phone is very easy to setup on existing or new phone plans. It takes about 1 hour to install the software, charge the phone, call sprint. All in all, very easy and pleasant to start up.

4. Option for PCS vision on a PDA screen. If you are multimedia/wireless web kind of person, this might be nice for you. Obviously, viewing a web page on a PDA screen is going to be a lot nicer than on your small cell phone screen. IN addition, because it is 3G enabled, the phone will download your emails all the time without requiring you to make a call. Not an issue for me, but if you are one of those people, the Treo has added pull. Just watch out, signing up for PCS vision means a more expensive plan which is probably only truly valuable to business users.

5. Keyboard. Now for some, this is a draawback. For a bad grafitti artist like myself, I found a keyboard to be very fast for entering in letters/numbers. The only problem is perhaps the small size of the buttons which could be a problem for those with arthritis or carpal tunnel. Otherwise, I found it pretty well designed.

6. Integration quality. This is an attribute that is hard to quantify but I can say that overall it is very nice not to have to carry two devices around. I think the best example of how the Treo has achieved some great benefits of integration is the ability to use your PDA while on the phone. For example, when someone calls you and asks you for a phone #, you can simply look it up while talking to the person. IN the old days, when my phone numbers were found only on the phone itself, I'd have to hang up, look up the number and call my friend back.

In the end, the Treo has 16 MB of memory, a color screen, a USB hotSync capability, all the typical Palm OS functionality and a workable (although as you'll see, somewhat inferior phone design) phone. The Treo has reached the design point where where I think a HEAVY user of BOTH a phone and a PDA would still be ahead overall, despite having somewhat decreased functionality vs 2 independent devices. In contrast, if you are a light PDA user, the TREO is probably not worth giving up the superior functionality of your cell phone. Likewise, if you are a heavy PDA user and light cell phone user, your current PDA will likely be easier to use.

7. Battery life. Pretty solid considering a color screen and need to support a phone. In general, I found that the Treo required daily charging with routine use: 2 hours of talking, standby of the phone throughout the day, 1-3 hour of continuous PDA use/day.

Now for the Cons:
1.Phone setup/navigation. This is really the most painful change for me and if you are a heavy phone user and light PDA user, this might be the factor that stops you from buying this phone.

First, let me describe the phone functionality. When you hit the "phone" menu button, you are first shown a "speed dial" page which allows you to quick dial a set of up to 50 numbers. This is a pretty nice screen (although I think unneccessary as you will see in a second). If you need to see a dial pad, you actually have to hit the "phone" menu button a second time to get there. To me, there seems to be no reason, you couldn't have the starting phone menu be the dial pad with speed dial being as simple as pressing "1" on the dialpad as on current phones.

To make matters worse, if you want to get a phone number using your contacts list--or even if you just want to look at your contact list--you have to hit the phone button THREE times. Amazingly, there is no menu button (you cannot even customize a button) for the contact list. This is likely the most used function of the palm device and you cannot directly get to it--what were they thinking?

Even worse, once you are on the contact list, they somehow neglected to put in a button that allows you to page through the contacts. This means you have to go record by record unless you pull out your stylus and press a down arrow that is on the screen. Imagine what a pain this is--you have to use both the keyboard and the stylus to navigate down the phone list. (I have recently discovered that you can hit the shift up button, then the down scroll button to go by pages but still annoying!)

I have tried some shortcuts like entering a letter of the last name to search by last name but the poor design continues--the phone book pulls out all names that even have the letter you press in. That means that you can't press the letter C and start your navigation on the last names that start from C. Instead, it pulls out a list of records that could be Applebaum, Chris, etc. so that it makes navigation really difficult.

2.Screen lighting. In a room, the screen looks great. IT's in color and the resolution is pretty solid. Take this outdoors, however, and you can't see a thing. I can't tell you how I wished for my phone during these moments. There is no easy way to adjust contrast unfortunately so you're stuck unless you want to pull out your stylus and reset your digitizer.

3.Keyboard/stylus mixing. The unfortunate thing about the keyboard--which I generally prefer--is that many functions also require the use of the stylus. It is REALLY ANNOYING when you use the keyboard to reach a menu but need a stylus to complete the function. I should note that in 80% of the cases, you DON'T need to use the stylus and thus, using the menu button is usually far easier than when you had to use a stylus in the old Palms; but that 20% is really annoying. For this reason, if you are really good at graffitti, this may be another reason to avoid this device.

4. Price. $499. Ouch. At the least, you've got good memore--16 MB and it includes a car charger, too!

5. Customer Service. I'm not sure if this has changed but generally speaking, Handspring is very stingy in terms of returning even defective products. I've had trouble in the past--including the annoying policy of having to pay for shipping even if the product is defective. We'll see but it is something you should consider. If you are really worried, you might consider buying your phone at sprint where they have offices (and humans!) who might be more willing to help.

Overall Impressions:
1) If you are a HEAVY user of both a cell phone and PDA, this is probably a very nice integrated product to help lighten your device overload.

2)If you are light user of one of the devices, I would recommend waiting until the navigation of the phone is improved--or until the price drops.

3) If you are a heavy user of wireless web/multimedia, this is a great device for you.

ADDENDUM: After 1 month of use, I wanted to note that, while the annoyances that I mention above are certainly true, most of them become tolerable after use. For instance, one of my complaints about the lack of a direct menu button to the phone contact list can be circumvented in the following way. If you start typing someone's name from the original phone screen, the TREO will quickly recognize that you want to go to the CONTACTS list. So, in this case, a quick button is not necessarily required.

In general, the integration value is really outweighing the annoyances so I wanted to add this to my epinion!