Palm Treo Pro
The Palm Treo Pro may have been a bit late in its release, but still we can guarantee that it will not fail to impress you with its amazing features. With its glossy black outer frame and rounded edges, we believe the device has more style and appeal in comparison to other cell phones in the same price category. The Palm Treo Pro is powered by Windows Mobile OS and sports a 2.5 inch touch-screen with a resolution of 320x320. The keypad onboard the Palm Treo Pro may appear small and cramped up, but when you use it, you will find that it is amazingly quiet and accurate. Other prominent features include a customizable home page with shortcuts, a side mounted speakerphone, and a 3.5 mm headphone jack.
The Palm Treo Pro fared quite well when we tested it for voice quality. The voice was clear and crisp at both ends and there was hardly any noticeable buzzing in the background. The voice on the speakerphone gets a bit distorted at full volume, but that's not a problem because even at low volumes, the sound is loud enough to be heard in noisy conditions. The device also provided the right response when we tried pairing it with third-party Bluetooth headsets. The onboard battery however, did not deliver the desired performance. On our average, we recorded a talk time of around 4 hours; something that we feel is low in comparison to talk time offered by other cell phones in the same product category.
On the Palm Treo Pro's homepage, you can have your own personal shortcuts to your favorite applications and tools. By keeping menu items to the minimum on the home page, the device ensures that you will not have to keep fiddling with the stylus, as has usually been the case with other Windows Mobile devices. However, there are certain distinctive advantages of Windows Mobile devices such as the fact that you can view and edit your word and excel documents, access power point presentations with original graphics and formatting and use advanced synchronization with Outlook, phone contacts and calendar entries. Another important benefit is that you will find virtually thousands of third-party applications that you can use with the Windows powered Palm Treo Pro.
The in-built Internet Explorer Mobile 6 may not have matched our expectations, but we don't think we have to downgrade our ratings of the Palm Treo Pro just due to some minor bugs. We believe people at Microsoft are already aware of the frequent crashing of Internet Explorer Mobile 6 and that very soon a patch will be released to fix the bug. Till that time, you can continue using other third-party web browsing applications, most of whom are much more stable and secure in comparison. The Palm Treo Pro however, performed quite well in the instant messaging department. The in-built IM application in the Palm Treo Pro works quite well with most of the popular chat clients including the likes of MSN Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger.
Considering the advantages and disadvantages, we would give the Palm Treo Pro a rating of 3, based on 5-star rating system. You can have the Palm Treo Pro if you are looking for a cell phone that is low-priced and yet offers some very useful features and essential office productivity tools.