In our Palm Treo Pro review, we gush over the improved Treo design and new features, but will this appeal to a new crowd of smartphone fans?
Review summary of the Palm Treo Pro:
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 The Palm Treo Pro is aiming squarely at its target audience - Palm devotees who need a serious upgrade. We can't see anyone else falling for the rather dull, underperforming Palm Treo Pro, though owners of Palm's previous generations of Treos might ooh and ahh at the GPS and Wi-Fi, and will certainly marvel at the slick, yet classy shell. Palm's best innovations are really in buttons and hardware shortcuts, but Windows Mobile limits how much Palm can accomplish with this device, and unlike more popular Windows Mobile manufacturers like HTC and Samsung, Palm has done little to nothing to improve the basic Windows Mobile experience. Overall, the Palm Treo Pro is a generally likeably, basic Windows Mobile Pro phone, but without carrier support it seems to lack many of our favorite services, and it isn't nearly enough to keep us from wondering when we'll see the next big thing from Palm. Release: September 2008. Price: $500.
Pros: A new, thinner look with great hardware improvements for the Treo line. Good GPS options. Strong Windows Mobile performance.
Cons: Only Treo owners will fall for this one. To everyone else, this is another mid-range, unlocked smartphone with few additional features or services.
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Full Palm Treo Pro Review:
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Design - Good
The Palm Treo Pro looks like a Palm Centro that grew up and got a real job. We always liked the visual appeal of the Palm Centro, a small pill of a phone with slick, rounded edges and a tight shell. The Palm Treo Pro is even more attractive, with a glossy black (and fingerprint-prone) coating and a somewhat larger keyboard than the Centro. The keys are still a bit small for us, and aligned in straight rows that make typing a bit awkward. The Palm Treo Pro also loses the soft keys that you'll find just below the screen on most Windows Mobile phones. It makes sense, since these menu items are always accessible by touch, but we're so used to pressing buttons below the screen that we often accidentally pressed the "Start" key or, even worse, the "OK" (close) key. The screen is perfectly flush with the phone, though, which made tapping those soft keys no problem once we taught our fingers to do so.
The Palm Treo Pro features a no-frills build of Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional edition, with no real usability upgrades from Palm. While other manufacturers, notably HTC with the Touch Diamond and Sony Ericsson with the Xperia X1, have taken great pains to improve and perhaps hide the Windows Mobile interface, Palm gives you the most basic version of the OS in the Palm Treo Pro, with only a few scant improvements hiding beneath the surface, and not where you'd really care to look for them (the Communication Manager, for instance). Windows Mobile may be a sturdy OS with some good productivity features and easy desktop synchronization, but it isn't pretty, nor is it easy to navigate without more help from the manufacturer.
Calling - Good
For calls, the Palm Treo Pro lacks even the basic improvements to the dialing and calling screens that we enjoyed on Palm's Centro on AT&T. Instead, the phone is Windows Mobile at its most basic. Calls sounded okay on the device, with no real distortion, but callers reported a sort of deep and muffled tone. Not too bad, but calls sounded better on our Palm Treo 755p on Sprint. For cellular reception, the Palm Treo Pro always had a steady 3-4 bars on AT&T's HSDPA network in lower Manhattan, on par with what we've seen on similar smartphones. For battery life, the Palm Treo Pro did fine, but came up short of more impressive devices. We managed about 4.5 hours of calling while connected to the HSDPA network, a notorious power hog.
For calling features, the Palm Treo Pro doesn't venture far beyond Windows Mobile 6.1, which is powerful enough in its own right. The address book synchronized perfectly with our Exchange server, and we've always liked the way Windows Mobile phones start searching our contact list as soon as we start typing a name, even from the Today screen. Conference calling should have been easier, but unfortunately the option is hidden beneath a menu, and the menu is only accessible by a touchable soft button on screen. When you place a call, the screen locks up, which seems like a wise move until you try to actually try to use a hidden menu feature, at which point you have to move the cursor with the navigation button first to unlock the screen, then open up the menu. It's an annoying process that would bother us over time. Like most Palm devices, voice dialing is absent, even as a premium, purchasable option on this phone.
Messaging - Good
For messaging features, all that buyers can expect with the Palm Treo Pro are the most basic messaging options that accompany Windows Mobile. For e-mail, especially for Exchange server users, this starts strong, and Outlook is a very good e-mail app on a mobile phone, especially if you have time to learn all of the keyboard shortcuts. For SMS and MMS, the phone does just fine, though we would have liked a nicer looking interface and perhaps some more messaging options, though threaded SMS messages have finally made their way to Windows Mobile in version 6.1, and this is a good thing. For Instant Messaging fans, hope you have an MSN account for IM, otherwise you'll be hunting down third-party apps.
The keyboard on the Palm Treo Pro is a bit shallow, a bit small for our taste. The keys don't rise up off the phone enough to catch a good grip, and they seem to be stacked close, even though every key is discrete. We had trouble typing, especially trying to peck out phone numbers in the dialer, but also in text messaging.
Of course, there aren't a lot of text options beyond standard spell-checking. We'd like to see some advanced features adopted in Windows Mobile, like the ability to choose a symbol simply by holding down the key (the HP iPaq 910 stupidly repeats the letter when held), or even some auto-correcting features, instead of just a helpful spell-checker for after-the-fact editing.
Scheduling and productivity - Very good
For scheduling, Windows Mobile is our favorite business smartphone OS, especially since we use an Exchange server for our corporate e-mail and calendar. The Palm Treo Pro did a fine job synchronizing with our calendar app and scheduling new appointments, though this is one area where some innovation in the OS, at least in the Today screen, would have made the calendar and tasks list easier to read at a glance. For productivity, the phone gets the standard Office Mobile suite. This is probably more than enough for most users, and we had no trouble viewing and creating Word and Excel documents, and even running through some PowerPoint slides on the device.
For business travelers, the Palm Treo Pro also comes with a version of WorldMate Pro for the device, though we're not sure if we were getting the full edition. The travel software can track flights, offer currency exchange rates and check local weather conditions, and also sits as a tiny bubble of a window on the Today screen. However, when we tried to access some of the more advanced features of the software, we were asked to pay a monthly fee, so perhaps this Pro version isn't so fully Pro after all.
Multimedia - Mediocre
The Palm Treo Pro synchronizes with Windows Media Player, and includes a 3.5mm headphone jack. If you're interested in any more multimedia feature discussion than that, you're looking at the wrong phone. The phone can accept memory cards up to an impressive 32GB, the upward limit of microSDHC cards, and for simple WMP synchronization, the Palm Treo Pro worked just fine. However, we've come to expect a lot more from a multimedia smartphone, so if Palm really wanted to impress us they would need to throw in some dedicated hardware controls for playback and a much better media player instead of the standard Windows Mobile kit. Even the last-generation Palm OS hardware had much better multimedia options.
GPS navigation - Good
The Palm Treo Pro doesn't benefit from being a carrier-branded phone, so there is no Sprint Navigation or VZ Navigator on this phone. However, the phone comes pre-loaded with TeleNav's navigation software, which is the software on which AT&T and other carriers base their navigation apps anyway, so this was no real loss. The TeleNav software did a fine job locating us and tracking us through our trip home. It was nice to finally see GPS on a Palm device, and the software was so useful, and so beyond the normal Windows Mobile platform, that we found this to be one of the better and more developed features for this device.
Camera - Mediocre
The camera on the Palm Treo Pro took some dreary-looking, but otherwise unremarkable images. This lens fit squarely in the middle of our cameraphone range, with enough detail and color to be acceptable, but poor light handling and some color distortion, along with plenty of noise and over-sharpening. So, about average for a mediocre, 2-megapixel shooter.
E-bay shot
The colors are completely washed out in this image, though the detail was still there. Around the edges of the lunch box it is much easier to see where the details became noisy.
Blue building, blue sky
The sky looks a bit purple in this shot, and the windows become quite jagged if you stare at them long enough. Plus, the precipice in the foreground is too blurry.
Shady street scene
The camera couldn't decide between light and dark in this one. In the sun, details are completely blown out. In the shade, noise is a problem.
Self portrait
This shot is better when you don't zoom in (as we usually feel about self portraits). The camera manages to keep a general color and look balanced, but loses a lot of detail when you try to distinguish all the fine hairs on this editor's head. Plus, without a mirror or reflective back, lining up a self portrait wasn't as easy as it could have been.
Web browsing - Good
The Web browsing experience on the Palm Treo Pro comes in at the bare minimum of what we would call good. The browser is the standard Internet Explorer app, which is just barely better than the WAP browser you might find on a standard multimedia non-smartphone. The experience is saved by faster HSDPA network speeds, and in a pinch Internet Explorer can get the job done. However, our page came out looking a bit jumbled, and the Internet experience is a far cry from what we've seen on better Windows Mobile phones with more manufacturer intervention. Definitely seek out the Opera browser before you use this device for real Web surfing.
Price and availability
The Palm Treo Pro is available now online for as little as $500.
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