The latest Palm OS driven smartphone is the Treo 680. It has similar dimensions to the very recently released Treo 750, but rather than Windows for Mobile, The 680 runs the same operating system that has made Palm a giant in the US Smartphone Market (O.S. version Palm 5.4.9). The Treo 680 is a quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE phone with an Intel PXA270 312 MHz processor, a 320x320 pixel 64K colour touchscreen and individual QWERTY button layout.

 

 

This phone will be the subject of a "Which Smartphone?" monster review, but that will take a little while longer...

 

  

 

The Feel of Treo: Palm Treo 680

There’s something about the new Palm 680. Most smartphones feel like small electronic devices, hewn together from multiple bits—a bit like calculators. The new Palms don’t feel like smartphones. It’s as if they had been carved out of a single, solid block.

Yes, at 112 x 58 x 20 mm, the Treo 680 is not the smallest smartphone: about the same size as an N93i. Yes, at 156 g, it’s heavy: you won’t be losing it from your grip in the next sudden gust.  But keep in mind features such as the huge screen and full QWERTY keypad, and it's not so big. The balance in the hand is perfect, and it’s comfortable. The interface is nicely ergonomic. The buttons are nice to touch and feedback is good. With the highly polished fascia it’s a thing of beauty, and it just oozes elegance. These phones are the dominant smartphone handsets in the USA, and it is easy to feel why.

Physical Design Features

Perhaps some of the magnetic effect of this phone comes from that highly polished metallic fascia that surrounds the screen and the main control pad. I have not seen one photo of the 680 that does it justice. You just have to get it in the flesh to appreciate it. But whatever the source of its charisma, you could easily forget that the phone was made from a predominately plastic exterior (at least from the front--the view that counts). The 680 also thankfully loses the external antenna stub of the earlier Palms such as 650 and 700’s.

Another difference between the 650 and 680 is perceived size. Whilst there’s nothing much in the difference of the 650 and 680 in physical dimensions, the 680—by way of its design—just feels so much more compact. First the antenna went. Then, Palm shaved some weight, some of the thickness, and most importantly introduced those gorgeous curves. A groove that is useful for grasping also runs along the side of the phone.

In the US the 680 comes in a few colour variants. Crimson, copper and arctic accompany the graphite model, but the latter is the only one that is sold in Australia. They really shouldn’t have held back. If only I had the time to picket outside the offices of Palm Australia...

Screen

The Treo 680 (like the 650 before it) has a 320 x 320 pixel touchscreen. This is one of the highest resolutions of screen for this small block format. Interestingly, it’s a full 80 pixels larger than the Treo 750 (Windows for Mobile OS) that has a 240 x 240 pixel screen but exactly the same body. The colour depth is 65k colours, and it looks a bit more dull than the 240k and 16m colour screens that augment most current models: dreary default wallpaper doesn’t help (but changing it may). Nevertheless, this can’t detract from the sheer size of the screen making it easy on the eyes. Aside: If you are a Treo 680 owner, heed the warning--never use a pen to tap the screen as you may leave permanent marks upon it (not a good look).

 

Keyboard

Moving on from the great body, and the full QWERTY keypad is still one of the best available. It offers a great feel and usability, considering the phone is about the same width across as a Samsung Blackjack. The buttons are highly convex and the separation between them should be adequate for most fingers. The function key and its most commonly used combination keys are intelligently placed. Some have complained that the small area of the numeric keyboard is a problem for larger fingers, and it might have helped to have a system like the Blackjack where the numeric keypad took on buttons immediately next to it for number functions. But those with normal fingers like myself might find this key duplication annoying--and I certainly do with the Blackjack--and so most will find the Treo 680 system to be fine just the way it is.

Other Controls

Button layout is similar to previous Treo units. The left side has volume and a customisable soft key, and the top is the fabulous Treo switch that kills all sound without profile fiddling. Indispensable stuff.

 

Performance

Speed / Memory

The 680 has the same processor as the 650. The increased performance is due to the increase (doubling) in memory size, to 64Mb of user-available. This is a big leap in performance terms. If you owned a 650, you will find that the 680 has less tendency to slow after the opening of many applications, and it speeds bluetooth device interaction. The Intel PXA270 processors run at faster clock speeds than the older PXA260 processors, but of more significance is that Wireless MMX instructions allow the PXA270 processors to deliver increased multimedia performance at lower clock speeds, which is better for battery life.

 

Telephony

Another area where the 680 picked up over the 650 was in call quality. Calls are clearer than with the 650, and the signal is stronger. The visual caller identity screen is characteristically Palm friendly and functional, and includes options to accept, simply reject or to reject a call with an SMS text message.

 

SMS

A nice feature of this phone straight out of the box that only comes 3rd party on Symbian devices is the threaded text message display. It allows you to quickly recall aspects of a text conversation  as it's all there, displayed above the current message in thread format, like internet text messaging.

 

Connectivity

The phone is a full quad-band, with GMS/GPRS/EDGE but no UMTS (no 3G). It supports SMS/MMS and Bluetooth 1.1. There is no Wi-Fi, and the phone doesn’t work with Palm’s Wi-Fi card either. Bluetooth capabilities include using the phone as a wireless modem. Third party software will get the phone to act as a USB flash card, which is significant given the capabilities for memory expansion (discussed immediately below).

 

Dump the Mp3 Player

This phone takes full size SD cards, and here’s the big bonus: eight (yes, 8) gigabytes of storage are obtainable with the Treo 680, now that 8Gb SDHC cards have become available. That’s a flash memory as big as the latest enhanced Nokia N91 music phone’s hard drive (but without the HDD tweeting or the bulbous body shape). It’s not officially supported, but users have been reporting success with the high capacity cards. The OS “card information” screen only acknowledges the first 3.9 gigs when the used capacity is lower than that, but go over 4 gigs and the correct size of used and free memory is displayed. It’s a small price to pay for a doubling of capacity. It makes this one of the best, if not the best smartphone available in the area of storage capacity.

Pocket tunes, the onboard music playing software, thus gets a huge boost in functionality with the 680. Background play is possible with this software. The excellent media management software also makes this amount of storage easy to navigate and work with.

 

Web Browsing

Browsing with Blazer is a new experience thanks to the 680. Another one of those performance boosts over the 650 comes to web access. Surfing seems at least double the speed. The caching of pages is very effective and means no re-downloading of a page once you’ve visited it, and large web pages are handled with ease. By nature a GSM/EDGE phone doesn’t offer enough kick for more intensive broadband mobile applications like streaming video.

 

Speaker Phone

The speaker phone is middle of the smartphone field: not the best in the class and certainly not the worst. OK for music in a quite area, and fairly good for hands free telephone calls. There’s little distortion as there’s not a lot of amplification driving the speaker element.

 

Camera

This is not really a camera phone, and at 640x480 pixels (or .3 megapixels) the onboard camera doesn’t pretend to be. It is useful for pictorial caller identity, and that’s about it. The pictures look fine on the screen of the phone, and believe me when I say that’s where they should stay. Don’t expect to be uploading shots to photoshop for pre-production work. The colour rendering of shots was quite good, considering it’s a token camera. Given that a few smartphones (E61, M600i, older Blackberrys (or should I say elderberrys?)) have chosen to omit this feature altogether, and that some other smartphone cameras can still be basically garbage at 2 megapixels, there is no great loss in this. The camera also shoots video.

 

Battery

Battery life is one of the few things that is supposedly not enhanced on the 680, compared to its predecessor. The manufacturer spec is 4 hours talk (compared to 6 hrs for the 650) and 300hrs of standby time. I am an extremely heavy user of the phone--averaging more than 50 calls/day--and the 680 still does what the 650 managed to do, which is to get through the day. Most users will not have a problem, and like many smartphones, a charge every evening should be more than adequate to keep the 680 up and running all day. A rare period of travel and respite from the urban pressures for a week gave the 680 a break, and saw the phone under light usage lasting for a few days between charges.

One thing Palm needs to learn from other manufacturers is to build a smaller battery charger, as for frequently travelling users the large one that they supply is quite cumbersome. The upside of this is for international use, as it does have a handy slot for changing the power point prongs, without having some horrid adapter poking out from your hotel wall.

 

Phone Software

The highly useable interface has tabs at the bottom of the screen to send the user to phone, favourites, contact directory and call history. Highlight a number/contact from either of those last two tabs, press the green button and a call to that party is made. Palm OS has one of the best user help systems including a great user tour, which every newbie should go through, and will get them up and running efficiently, with little growing pain.

Documentstogo takes the phone beyond the capability of the current Windows competition, as it lets you view, share and edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Straight from your email, Microsoft Office documents can be managed (Word/Excel/Powerpoint) in their native format without the need for conversion.

 

3^rd Party Software

Like Symbian and Windows smartphones, there are masses of software available for the Palm OS. Skate the surface of the software capabilities of the Treo 680 by checking out the "green light" applications list here . (external link)

 

 

Conclusion

The Treo 680 is the statement of a company which fortunately continues to acknowledge the useability and popularity of their own OS, even though they are partnering with Microsoft and Windows Mobile OS with the Treo 700W and 750. (The recently announced U.S. Treo 755 also has Palm OS, and hence does the same thing for the US CDMA market that the 680 does here.) Seasoned owners of Treos would be gravely disappointed were it not the case that Palm kept the OS alive.

Personally I think that just the cosmetic enhancements alone are enough to warrant the upgrade from the 650, but that’s a Palm nut talking. The more sober serial phone killer within me acknowledges that the increase in memory leads to better performance, and this phone is just about everything that I wanted my old 650 to be. After using the Treo 750 for two weeks, I am no less enthusiastic about the 680 either: even though the 750 betters the Jasjam, it still doesn’t offer the beautiful friendliness of the Palm OS. The 8 gig capacity is the absolute clincher for me, and makes this the next phone I call my own. As someone who needs a phone as a matter of survival, I can’t pay it any greater compliment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Manufacturer's Specifications