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February 02, 2007
Third CES Favorite: Treo 750 Smart Device
It is pretty clear that the U.S. market is usually the last to receive innovative telephony products because of all the hoops the FCC and telcos make developers jump through. For instance, I saw some killer devices from HTC that would make anyone drool. However, they are all waiting for telco approval. I wondered when the Palm 750 would be available in this country after its release in Europe first. Well, it's finally here, and it’s about time!
The new Palm 750 is almost identical to the 700w and wx in appearance, except that it has lost that ugly antenna and it has some minor keypad changes. The big difference is that it is Palm’\'s first GSM quad band device, which makes it usable pretty much anywhere in the world.
It still has that silly connector at the bottom of the unit that requires a separate cable for USB sync and another cable for charging. Why not combine the two functions with the use of a standard mini-USB connector as most other machines have these days? This is really a non-issue when virtually all of the machines made by HTC already have such a setup in place. HTC makes the Palm 750 and could have easily added a mini USB connector. Obviously, for some inexplicable reason, Palm didn't want to change its outmoded system.
Perhaps my biggest disappointments are that the screen is still just 240 x 240 pixels, and there is no built-in Wi-Fi. It's almost incomprehensible to me that any Pocket PC would enter the market place without Wi-Fi. It seems obvious that this was probably beyond Palm’s control and a dictate of a greedy telco that wants you to use their pokey network and charge you for it instead of fast, free Wi-Fi. Bah!
Not only does it not have built-in Wi-Fi, it has switched from an SD card slot to a mini-SD card slot, which makes it impossible at this time to use a Wi-Fi card. You will be stuck with Cingular's EDGE network for surfing the Web, which is slower than EVDO used by the 700w ad700wx. At least, you can insert an SD Wi-Fi in the 700s.
The new 750 still uses the 1.3 MPX camera when most of the new Pocket PCs are going to 2.0 and 3.0 MPX.
Here's some good news: the Bluetooth codecs have been upgraded so that you can listen to stereo sound and use wireless Bluetooth headphones. The Samsung 300 MHz processor is a bit slower though.
Anyway, it's a nice unit, and I will give it a complete review when I get my hands on one next week. I am amused that Palm and Cingular are not touting the 750 as a Smartphone because it's not a Smartphone, it's a Pocket PC. Now they are calling it a Smart Device, which makes a lot more sense and avoids confusion as users will no longer try in vain to use Smartphone software on a Pocket PC.
Incidentally, you may be interested to know that I noticed more Palm packers than any other type of phone at CES. I couldn't tell you if they were Palm OS or WM5 because they were usually glued to the owner's ear or ensconced in a case. But, I suspect that the majority were WM5 because of the dominant Microsoft presence at CES.
Look for my full review of the Treo 750 in the April issue of Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine.
Posted by conradb212 at February 2, 2007 06:48 PM