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Palm Treo 680
Coming from the Palm family of smartphones, which is said to be saying goodbye from the shelves of gadget stores soon, Treo 680 is designed for the larger mass audience rather than for the more tech-savvy businessmen. It is less expensive, but of course, with less stunning features.
The improved Treo 680 would still bulge in your pocket, coming out at 113 x 59 x 21.3mm and weighing 157 grams. Thankfully though, it already shed its stubby antenna, which is more of an annoyance than a useful feature. The phone sports a full 64 key QWERTY keyboard, which is not the most convenient way to key in messages. However, a touch sensitive on-screen display makes up for it, serving as a phones number pad. The touch screen is still a welcome addition, although one-handed navigation with external control is already good enough. It would pay to take note though, that you might want to use a screen protector so you won’t smudge your display with frequent use. The touch screen is still the same 2.5 inch diagonal screen with 320 x 320 pixel resolution and 64,000 color output.
The result is sharp and vibrant images and texts. And what’s more, display is still readable under direct sunlight!
The phone comes in four exciting colors, which include Arctic (white), Copper (orange), Crimson (bright red), and Graphite (similar to Sprint Treo 700p’s color).
Treo 680 is a quad-band GSM phone so you can use it overseas. It is supported by Cingular’s EDGE network, making faster web browsing and download times possible. It also has an integrated Bluetooth 1.2, allowing wireless connection with a Bluetooth-enabled laptop. What irks tech-savvy people about this smartphone, though, is its lack of 3G and Wi-Fi capabilities.
Several email solutions are featured in this smartphone. They are Goodlink, Cingular Xpress Mail, and its popular VersaMail 3.5. Xpress Mail and VersaMail gives access to your personal accounts with POP3 and IMAP and also to your corporate email. However, the latter does not allow wireless push delivery.
A rather useful element that is first introduced in the Treo 700w makes a comeback in Treo 680—the “Ignore with text” feature that allows you to reply to a call you can’t take with a text. Just tap the “ignore with text” icon on the screen and a template message would be sent to the caller. This is especially useful when you are in very important meetings.
What I really love about this Palm phone is its Windows-compatible applications, such as the Documents to go 8.0 for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF documents. These come in handy for people who are working on the go. They can easily review their presentations and reports while on the way to a meeting or conference. The phone’s 64MB user available memory and 64MB SDRAM should be enough to store your average reference files and presentations. If not, you can insert up to 2GB SD cards in the expansion slot.
What Palm sacrificed in this inexpensive unit is the camera, giving it a low VGA resolution. The lowly camera has 2x zoom video-recording capability but comes without effect options. On a brighter side, Treo 680 is equipped with PocketTunes for your MP3s with an option to upgrade to its Deluxe edition should you want it to support other music formats.
Finally, battery life is a decent four hour talktime and 12.5 days on standby.