750 Palm Treo V

Smartphone 750 palm treo with useable qwerty keyboard

Hooray for the Palm Treo 750: it has a qwerty keyboard instead of the normal cellphone keypad.

The keyboard is small enough to be considered compact, yet it is easy enough to use for larger and pudgier fingers like mine to thumb out messages.

Speaking on the phone does take a bit of getting used to, though. When I answered calls, my ear - pressed against the screen - accidentally started up applications that I had no intention of using. Butthis problem can be solved during an active call by choosing an option to deactivate the screen.

Audio wise, the Palm Treo 750 could do better: although the sound clarity was loud and crisp for calls, I could hardly hear the default ring tones and alarms when walking about in the city area, even at the loudest volume setting. The ability to quickly swap to silent mode with a switch at the top of the phone is pretty nifty, though.

The camera function seems to have been added in as an afterthought. The 1.3-megapixel camera may be sufficient for taking good quality still pictures, but for some reason, when it attempts to take video, the resulting footage ends up a little grainy.

Compared to the BlackBerry series, or the more mainstream Nokia phones, both of which have similar offerings, the main draw and strength of the Palm Treo 750 is the Windows Mobile 5.0 platform.

It allows it easy synchronisation with my computer via Microsoft Activesync 4.0 using the provided USB cable. Applications like Microsoft Office and Windows Media Player are installed on the smartphone as default, so there is no need to convert files to a compatible format whether it is being moved to or from the smartphone to the computer.

- By Eugene Loh, a freelance writer.

FINAL SAY

The Palm Treo 750 is obviously targeted at the working professional as its functions are most suited to those who need access to the Internet and work files on the go. Those who use such functions only occasionally, and those on a tight budget should skip it.