In Brief

We've long been waiting for the perfect Palm smartphone that would take advantage of all the Palm platform has to offer, as well as be a great and usable cell phone. The Treo 600, while quite good, wasn't that phone. But the Palm Treo 650 from Cingular really smoothes out the rough edges. If you've been carrying around both a phone and a PDA because the earlier Treos didn't quite cut it, this is your chance to join the smartphone revolution.

The Palm OS has had a long time to mature, and in terms of usability and application support, it's hard to beat. The Treo 650 is the first converged PDA/phone where we've been able to use the entire software suite one-handed (nearly every stylus action can be performed with the 5-way navigation pad).

What's more, you can rely on the Treo 650 for Internet access. The built-in Web browser, Blazer, is capable and fast, thanks in no small part to Cingular's high-speed EDGE wireless network, with burst rates of up to 230Kbps. VersaMail, the built-in email client, is quite nice as well, supporting IMAP and POP3. The cramped keyboard takes some getting used to, but within a few minutes we were composing email and typing URLs into the browser as though the Treo 650 were just a small computer.

However, all is not perfect in Treoland. It took a while to get set up with the correct data plan, and the Treo was plagued by seemingly random restarts. We were able to work through both of these problems, but they tarnished what could have been a stellar out-of-the-box experience. Fortunately, later buyers should not have to go through the same startup woes.

In Depth

No other smartphone balances its capabilities as evenly as the Treo 650. Although none of the major features stands out as tops in its class, that shouldn't imply an overall mediocrity: the Treo 650 excels as a cameraphone, a PDA, and a regular cell phone. It also provides Bluetooth support for headsets and HotSync, although not for laptop modem access (see more on Bluetooth on the Setup page)

As a cell phone, the Treo 650 is excellent. It comes with a good selection of ringtones, and you can add your own. Voice quality was excellent when using the Treo as a handset and as a speakerphone. We also greatly appreciated the silence switch on top of the Treo, which allowed us to turn off all sounds without having to fumble through on-screen menus. All cell phones should have a switch like this.

It took us a little longer to get used to the keyguard -- the Treo 650 puts a soft-lock on its screen and keyboard after a preset time to prevent accidental input while in your pocket or purse. (you can modify or disable this in Prefs application).

As a PDA, the Treo provides all the benefits of the Palm platform, including those thousands of third-party applications. Included with the phone are the usual Palm organizer programs, plus VersaMail, the Blazer Web browser, RealPlayer, Documents To Go (which lets you read Office documents on your Treo), camera software, and more. The familiar Palm launcher provides access, and the HotSync program works with both Mac and Windows, unlike Pocket PC-based phones, which require third-party software to work with the Mac.

Email and Web browsing worked smoothly for the most part. We had no problems with POP3 email in VersaMail, but one of our accounts, based on a secure IMAP server mysteriously stopped working after a few days. The cure was to redo the account settings from the Accounts menu. It worked fine again after that.

Internet browsing speed with Blazer was excellent, thanks to Cingular's EDGE network. EDGE is an improvement over GPRS that uses essentially the same technology but fits more data into each timeslot (a slice of time and radio frequency spectrum) that's combined into a single data connection. Typical GPRS devices give you 40Kbps of bandwidth. The Treo 650 gets up to 192Kbps (downstream) and 96Kbps upstream. With DSLReports.com's Mobile Speed Test, we obtained an average speed of 97Kbps.

The Treo 650's camera is merely VGA (640-by-480), but it's consistent with current trends: although digital cameras keep cranking up the megapixels, many smartphone manufacturers are instead sticking with VGA but focusing their efforts on improving the quality of the pictures. This makes a lot of sense when you consider that most cameraphone users like to send their pictures over email wirelessly: if you increase the megapixels, you increase the amount of time it takes for other folks to receive your pictures. Even in the winter twilight of New England, we got a decent picture out of the Treo 650.

One of the things we love about Palm OS is the wide variety of affordable third-party applications -- more than 20,000 titles. You can find games, multimedia applications, productivity applications, and more at the Palm Software store. You can purchase most of these online and download them right away, and many applications have trial versions. For example, we were quite taken with Causerie, an instant messenger program that lets us chat over AOL, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, and Jabber.

One of our favorite Treo 650 features is the built-in MP3 player. Although the Treo 650 is short on internal memory, you can add an inexpensive MMC or SDIO card to store plenty of music. The easiest way to put music on your Treo's memory card is to insert it into a card reader, connect it to you computer, and copy your MP3s to the Audio folder on the memory card. Once you've loaded your tunes, fire up RealPlayer and dance away. If you plan to listen to a lot of music, you'll probably want to upgrade to a stereo headset/headphones, since the included headset is monaural.

The Treo 650's battery life was acceptable, although not quite as rosy as the ads say when put to full use. We managed 68 hours on a full charge before the battery ran down. During this time we surfed the Web, used Bluetooth for HotSync, took photos, played music, and made 90 minutes worth of voice calls. Bluetooth was active the entire time, which may explain the disparity between the battery life quoted in the specifications and what we actually obtained. On the calls we made, we were quite pleased with the quality of the built-in speaker and speakerphone.

While the Treo 650 is a fantastic all-round smartphone, we ran into some data plan and overall stability problems that could have been avoided by Cingular. The bad news is that some users are still suffering from these. The good news is that they can be easily remedied.

At first, we found ourselves without a data plan. The low-cost unlimited MEdiaNet plan we bought did not seem to work with our phone. A call to Cingular customer care didn't help much -- we were steered toward the $79.99 monthly plan, which is (in theory) only for laptop users. We eventually managed to get on the correct plan, the Cingular Unlimited PDA Connect plan ($44.99 a month). Palm site store buyers can get support for phone and PDA functions in one place. However, plans change frequently, so check the latest prices before you buy.

Despite these problems, the Treo 650 is our favorite smartphone to date, and a simply exceptional all-round performer. It combines solid email, Web browsing, phone, camera, and PDA features, all with one-handed ease and a nice big color screen four times the resolution of the Treo 600. The only things we can complain about are the inability to use the phone as a Bluetooth modem with your laptop and lack of Wi-Fi, but the reasonably wide EDGE coverage means you'll get better-than-dialup speeds in most urban areas. Even better, it's a worldphone you can take anywhere. Just be sure to check overseas data plan rates before you start sending back your vacation pictures.