Palm Treo 800w with Windows Mobile Professional 6.1
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Introduction
It's been a year and a half since Palm released the Treo 750. The landscape of mobile phones has changed quite a bit since then. Everyone is clamoring for touch screen devices with animated flashy finger-friendly interfaces. Luckily Palm is immune to the popular reality distortion field of the time and has released a new Windows Mobile device that actually implements some useful innovations that build on Windows Mobile's strengths without sacrificing usability and efficiency. I was honestly and unexpectedly surprised to see how genuinely impressive Palm's Treo 800w turned out to be. Read on to find out exactly what's so great about Palm's latest Windows Mobile smartphone!
Review Date: July 14, 2008
Picture Highlights
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| As you may already know, the best thing about owning a Windows Mobile Palm Treo as opposed to any other Windows Mobile device is the software customizations that Palm has integrated with the operating system (see page 2 for more about these enhancements), however it seems that with the 800w, Palm has also done some major optimizations to Windows Mobile itself. | On the Today screen, Palm has created some great enhancements to the normal Windows Mobile Today screen. |
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| The old Picture Speed Dial Today Screen item was not enabled by default, but it's still listed in the Today Screen control panel so you can easily bring it back. It hasn't changed much from the Treo 750. In the Speed Dial options, you can set up speed dial buttons, make Picture Speed Dials and assign them to shortcut keys. The Picture Speed dials use the photos that are assigned to your contacts in Outlook. | You can also launch the Sprint Navigation (Telenav) application manually, and use the application's menus. |
Overall Impression
At first I thought the speed of the Treo 800w was just my imagination since I had been using the animation-heavy Touch Diamond previously. But then I compared it to the TyTN II running Windows Mobile 6.1. The Treo 800w is actually very fast, efficient, and powerful. It's Blackberry fast! Combine that with some added keyboard shortcut combinations, and you've got a great business phone.
I love what Palm has done with the Windows Mobile operating system as well as the GPS ease-of-use integration enhancements. Microsoft should have started integrating GPS navigation features like this into Windows Mobile a long time ago. It's wonderful to be able to set a navigation destination just as easily as calling some one or sending an email! Combine this with the amazingly fast GPS time-to-fix, and I was very impressed by this little Treo. It's far easier to use this as your navigation device than any in-car computer (and most other GPS enabled smart phones.)
In a world that has become obsessed with finger-friendly multi-touch-screen flick-scrolly animated entertainment phones, it's nice to see some one still knows how to make an efficient mobile communications/business tool.
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