In Brief

If you're tired of carrying both cellphone and PDA, the PalmOne Treo 600 allows you to replace your mobile technology load with a superior combination device that gives you cell, PDA, and email capabilities in one pocketable unit. It even has a digital camera and Web browser.

The Treo 600 is available in the US in a CDMA version from Sprint (as tested) and a GSM/GPRS version from AT&T Wireless, Cingular, and T-Mobile. Orange offers the GSM/GPRS unit in Europe.

With a street price between $400 and $450, and voice and data plans beginning at $50-$60 per month (depending on the wireless carrier), owning the Treo 600 isn't an inexpensive proposition. But you may find, as I did, that the convenience of being able to check email or access the Web from anywhere, together with the advantages of a full-strength Palm PDA and a feature-filled cell phone, is powerful enough incentive to make room in your budget.

In Depth

The first thing that you notice about the Treo 600 is that it looks and feels like, well, a phone, rather than a PDA. Compared to previous combination devices, which often appeared to be the unholy union of a plastic brick and a cellphone, the Treo fits well in your hand and in your pocket. At only 6 ounces and less than an inch thick, you can easily carry the Treo in a coat, shirt, or even front pants pocket without unsightly bulges.

Design & User Interface: The Sprint CDMA version of the phone we tested has a charcoal case, while the GSM/GPRS version is a cool silver. The two versions are otherwise externally similar, except that the GSM units have a slot on the back for a SIM card.

As with any Palm device, the Treo has a set of remappable application buttons that let you access various functions directly. From left to right, the four buttons by default bring up the phone, the Palm Calendar, e-mail (and chat), and Key Guard, a special feature that locks the keyboard and turns off the display.

The Treo's thumb keyboard is backlit and pleasingly stiff, so you won't be pressing keys by mistake. The rounded key tops and their spacing should be easy to use for all but the largest fingers. In the middle of the keyboard, in a contrasting color, there's a number pad for dialing the phone. You can also use the touchscreen or your Contacts list to dial.

The Palm Home and Menu buttons are in the bottom row of the keyboard, to the right of the Space bar. The Home button brings up the Palm OS home screen, and the Menu button invokes a menu in any Palm application. Once a menu is displayed, you can navigate it using the excellent four-way direction pad. When you've highlighted the menu item you want, pressing the direction pad's center button activates it. Virtually all of the Palm applications that come with the Treo have been adapted to use the direction pad, which means that you hardly ever need to use the stylus tucked into the top of the Treo, and lets you operate the unit one-handed.

On the left side of the unit you'll find two buttons for ringer volume. On top, there is the cellphone antenna, the SD card slot, the infrared port, and the stylus. The top also has the power button, and a sliding switch that toggles the phone between ringer and vibrate modes. On the back you'll find the digital camera lens, the speakerphone grille, and a pinhole for the Reset button. The bottom of the Treo has a headset jack and the docking connector. The speaker deserves special kudos, being loud and clear enough so that you actually want to use the speakerphone function.

When using the phone, a click of the directional pad brings you to your Favorites (5 pages with 10 buttons each that give one-click access to applications, Web pages, speed dials, or SMS message recipients), the Web browser, the Pictures application (which turns on the digital camera), or the Contacts application. Any of these functions can be reassigned using the Phone application's Display Preferences.

Voice quality on the Treo was very good for the most part, although if you're not in a strong reception area, callers' voices can fade annoyingly.

Organizing Your Life: The Treo 600 comes with all of the standard Palm applications, plus a POP3 e-mail client, an SMS text messaging program, the Blazer 3.0 Web browser, and software for the digital camera. Third-party applications include a viewer edition of Data Viz's Documents to Go, which allow you to view Microsoft Word and Excel documents that are attached to e-mail; SplashID, which stores passwords and PINs; SplashMoney, a simple financial organizer; SplashShopper, for managing shopping lists; and two games, Klondike and Zap! 2016, a scrolling shooter game that was quite enjoyable:

You can even use the Treo as a MP3 music player with the $25 Pocket Tunes Deluxe. This software can play MP3 or Ogg Vorbis files stored in your Treo, or can use Shoutcast streams wirelessly (though you had better have an all-you-can-eat data plan!). Music through the speaker was about the quality that you would expect, but through the mono handsfree earpiece it was acceptable for casual listening. It certainly won't replace your iPod, but it'll do in a pinch.

The Treo comes with 32MB of memory, of which 24MB is available for your own applications and data. This is more than enough for most people, but if you need more storage for data or music, you can use the SD/MMC card slot.

What's the Catch? While the Treo is both a great combo phone/PDA and a serious advance on the standard Palm user interface, the Treo 600's touchscreen display doesn't live up to the rest of the unit. The good news is that the screen is really bright, easily the brightest of any handheld device I've used. It's easily visible outside on a sunny day, and at night, you may find yourself actually turning the screen brightness down a bit.

The bad news is the screen's low 160x160 pixel resolution, with a maximum of only 4,096 colors (12-bit depth). In comparison, most higher-end cell phones and other Palm devices can display 65,000 colors, or 16 bits. The Palm Zire 72, a far less expensive unit, comes with a 320x320 pixel, 16-bit display. The Treo's passive-matrix, low-resolution LCD is most detrimental when you're trying to browse Web pages or use the digital camera feature. We suspect the choice has something to do with power management and battery life, but hope future Treos address this issue.

Another drawback is the lack of built-in Bluetooth for wireless synchronization and other applications. Again, this is a feature which is common in most cell phones in this price range.

Despite these two flaws, the Treo 600 is a well-thought-out device that has quickly gained a large and avid following. It not only seamlessly integrates two essential techno-gadgets into one slim device, it manages to upgrade many elements of the Palm interface at the same time.