After waiting for almost a year for the new Treo 600 smartphone, local fans of the Palm operating system could be forgiven for losing patience and buying something else. But the first fully functioning smartphone from the PalmOne stable is worth waiting for.
The styling of the device makes it as the best-looking Palm to date. The matt-silver case is dominated by a 2.5-inch display, which is slightly smaller than that on the average Palm but makes most phone screens look like postage stamps.
Power up the device and the screen disappoints slightly. While other Palm devices boast 64,000 colours, this one has just 3,375 - fine for a phone, but pretty poor for a PDA.
The display is not the only letdown. The Treo lacks Bluetooth and Wi-fi, both of which appeared in earlier Palm Tungstens, while the 640x480 camera is unexceptional.
Still, the Treo 600 is without doubt the gadget PDA users have dreamt of ever since Apple launched its ill-fated Newton a decade ago.
Running on the Palm OS 5.2 with 32MB of memory, a Secure Digital and Multi Media Card slot and a 144MHz ARM processor, the Treo makes a good PDA. It also offers stereo support, although users must supply their own MP3 software and stereo headset. The keyboard may be small but, with practise, even stumpy fingers can grow accustomed to the rounded, back-lit keys.
There are several new features to the software that take advantage of the camera. Photos can be cropped and stored in your address book and they can be edited, so you can draw or write on them before sending them by MMS. The new Blazer Web browser is a huge improvement over previous products. With Blazer and GPRS, you can spend the morning commute surfing news sites or checking e-mail.