Treo 700w: A marriage not made in heaven
Alas, even after all that plastic surgery, you can’t escape the fact that you’re basically running Windows.
For instance, you open programs from a tiny Start menu, which you activate by pressing a dedicated Windows-logo key. Fine, except that the Start menu has room to list only seven programs. For access to anything else, you must open the Programs folder. But even here, only nine icons fit on each screen, and no list view is available. So you have to do a lot of scrolling.
Like it or not, Windows Mobile also teaches you about memory management. Every time you open a program, it stays open in the background, even if you close its window. Sooner or later, you’ll run into the “Program Memory Low” error message, requiring you to shut down programs manually in a special list box.
The 700W’s beefed-up memory (60 megabytes free) makes this situation less frequent. Still, the whole ritual should be unnecessary. Doesn’t anyone at Microsoft realize how silly it sounds to say, “Just a minute - I have to quit some programs on my phone”?
That’s not the only hit to efficiency. Microsoft must believe that all its customers bill by the hour. Just rotating a photo requires four steps. The Treo 700W no longer has buttons for Calendar and Address Book, either; those functions are now buried in menus that require more steps to reach. Buttons for Mute and Speakerphone used to appear right on the Treo screen during calls. These, too, are now in menus. What once required one step now requires two - if you even know where to look for them.
Here’s another example: On older Treos, you could write a new appointment directly onto, say, the 3:30 p.m. line of the calendar’s Day view. Microsoft’s version offers no such instant gratification. Instead, creating a new appointment requires choosing starting and ending times from pop-up menus inside a dialogue box. Only half-hour increments are available; let’s hope you never have a 4:45 train to catch.
Palm didn’t help matters by adding a prominent O.K. key, which actually means just the opposite. That is, instead of Yes, Go or Forward, it means Cancel, Back or Stop. You use it, for example, to cancel out of a dialogue box or window, to backtrack to a previous screen, or to close a menu without making a choice. It must have been designed by the same person who, in the full-blown Windows, put the Shut Down command in the Start menu.
Speaking of steps backward, Treonauts should note that the 700W’s screen resolution is only 240 by 240 pixels, far coarser than the previous model’s. (Palm maintains that this restriction is imposed by Microsoft’s software.)
Verizon Wireless is the first carrier of this Treo - a surprising development since it was the last major cellular company to offer the previous Treo model.
Yet Verizon Wireless is partly responsible for the 700W’s crippled Bluetooth (short-range wireless) features. For example, Verizon has turned off the feature that lets your laptop get online using the Treo as a wireless antenna. You can use a wireless headset, but the phone works only with some Bluetooth-equipped cars; the Toyota Prius, for example, isn’t on the list. (If history is any guide, these features will be available from other carriers when they get the Treo 700W later this year.)
There are certainly bright spots in the 700W. It’s brisk and responsive, it feels great in your hand and it does a lot of stuff. (In fact, the only modern cellphone feature missing is Wi-Fi wireless networking, which you can add with Palm’s $100 SD Wi-Fi card.)
But considering that Palm’s designers once worshipped at the altar of interface excellence, it’s a shame that Microsoft’s convoluted software has produced such an awkward marriage with the hardware. Longtime Treo fans, in particular, will be absolutely baffled by the new software layout.
Then again, the 700W wasn’t built for longtime Treo fans (who, in any case, can still buy the older 650 model). It was built for corporate buyers, whose top priorities may not include providing the most pleasurable experience possible for the worker bees.