Palm Treo 700w Review

Palm’s line of Treo Smartphones has been widely praised since the first model was introduced, and while the Treo’s popularity has only grown with the passage of time, the same cannot be said for the Treo’s operating system, the Palm OS. During the Treo’s rise to popularity, Microsoft’s competing handheld OS, Windows Mobile, has become more favored and more widely used than ever before, a development that has pushed many away from Palm brand products and toward manufacturers willing to produce Windows Mobile devices.

Now, for the first time, and in a move that shocked many onlookers, Palm has put Windows Mobile on one of its handhelds. That handheld is the Treo 700w, the first Palm device to run any operating system other than Palm OS. It was Palm’s hope that a marriage of their popular and recognizable Treo with the increasingly favored Windows Mobile OS would make for an attractive mixture. They were right.

It’s hard to read a story about the Treo 700w without a few paragraphs concerning its running of Windows Mobile 5, and for good reason. What makes the 700w so desirable to so many consumers is the Windows Mobile platform, offering the first chance for fans of both the Treo and the Windows Mobile platform to find the two in one place. While Mac users will certainly be left out in the cold (as they have often been with other Palm products), the availability of a Windows Mobile Treo is a very welcome sight.

Because of the Treo’s history and its newfangled Windows Mobile workings, it’s difficult to know whether the 700w should be called a Pocket PC Phone or a smartphone. In the continuum between smartphone and PDA phone, the Treo 700w falls somewhere in the middle, and while arguments can be made that the unit is more PDA than smartphone or vice versa, everyone involved with the product considers it a smartphone, so we’ll acquiesce (although it is technically a Pocket PC Phone).

The 700w “smartphone” is powered by a 312MHz Intel XScale processor and contains a 128MB flash memory chip, of which approximately 66MB is free to the end user. Other features include a 240x240 color display, a full QWERTY thumb keyboard, onboard Bluetooth wireless, an SDIO-ready Secure Digital card slot, EV-DO high-speed wireless compatibility, an Infrared data port and a rechargeable, replaceable Lithium-Ion battery

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Palm Life Drive

Over the last few years we've seen PDAs evolve into more media friendly devices. While some PDA purists will tell you that PDAs were meant to be productive and not iPods, consumers want more choices and they want them in as few devices as possible. That's where the Palm Lifedrive comes in. While Palm calls their other devices handhelds, the LifeDrive is appropriately called a Mobile Manager. So what makes the LifeDrive so special? Follow us as we tell you more.
What Makes the LifeDrive so Special?
When you first see the Palm LifeDrive Mobile Manager, you realize this isn't your typical PDA. In fact, with all of the focus of promoting the LifeDrive as an entertainment device, you may wonder if Palm sacrificed on the PDA features. We'll talk about the "PDA-ness" of the Lifedrive in a minute but let's first talk about the hardware. For starters, the LifeDrive is the first PDA released in the US that uses a hard drive istead of flash memory for storage. What that means is that while the typical PDA might have 32 to 64MB of storage capacity, the LifeDrive gives you 4GB of storage.

Besides the massive storage capabilities, Palm also went all the way by including both 802.11b and Bluetooth wireless. For you long-time Palm users, you realize that Palm's embracing wireless to this extent is probably a bigger deal than the inclusion of a hard drive. We'll talk more about these innovations but first we'll start with the complete specifications.

Microdrive
The heart of the LifeDrive is a 4GB(3.85GB of usable storage) Hitachi Microdrive which is smaller than a matchbook. Microdrives are extremely reliable and aren't new to PDA Power users. Personally I've used a 1GB Compact Flash Microdrive on my PDA for several years with no issues.

For detailed info and specifications, click here...................................