Palm Treo 700wx

The Treo 700wx is the CDMA Windows Smartphone edition of the Treo 700. As usual, this review is not to critique the non-phone aspects of the device, which means I won’t pass judgment on the Windows operating system or on any of the data-centric things that you can do with this model. My focus, as always, is on the phone portion of the device.



The Treo 700 offers optional WiFi, but only as an add-on. In order to use WiFi you must plug the provided WiFi adapter into the SD card slot. This means you cannot have any expanded memory available while connected to the Internet via WiFi, though I'm told you can get a WiFi card with memory built into it. Nonetheless, the arrangement smacks of afterthought, which is exactly the impression I got from the phone functionality. Plenty of other Smartphone and PDA models have WiFi built directly into the device and do not subject you to such limitations.



The camera in the Treo 700 is a 1.3 megapixel unit, but the quality of the photographs is very disappointing. All of the pictures I took using the Treo and my Motorola i580 (which also has a 1.3 megapixel camera) revealed that the one in the Treo is fuzzy-looking. It’s almost as though the image sensor has lower-than-1.3-meaapixels resolution and then the image is sampled up to 1280 x 1024. I ensured that the lens was spotless before taking the shots, but they still came out fuzzy. Here are links to a few of the samples and their associated shots taken with the i580.



Any other uses notwithstanding, the Treo 700wx is possessed of one of the worst CDMA phones I’ve tested in ages. It’s horrible sound quality, atrocious over-the-road performance, frustrating little keypad, and inability to cope well with background noise during conversations makes it a terrible choice for those looking for a quality phone to go along with their data-centric device. While it seems endemic throughout the industry to provide second-rate phones on PDA devices, the Treo takes this to a new low. Unless you absolutely want a Palm running Windows, you’d do yourself a big favor to look elsewhere.