I mugged Santa early this year and got hold of a Treo 600, to replace a Blackberry that I have struggled with for some time now. The appeal of a full 24mb palm organiser, world phone, on a GSM/GPRS network, with a keyboard, and SD slot, along with the dream of mobile SSH, was too much to resist. It didn't help that this model Treo was also getting hyped up by media identities who follow the release of such cutting edge devices eagerly. (Meckler likes it, Walter Mossberg thinks microsoft smartphones lose to it, etc).

This year I've owned a Blackberry, a Sony P800, and now, the Treo. All devices claim to do similar things. Data on the go. Keyboard or stylus entry. Phone meets PDA. Mobile data everywhere.

My old P800 review is here. In summary, I was pretty disappointed with it, really. It felt flimsy, it was annoying to use a stylus to peck at a slippery on-screen keyboard, and there were plenty of glitches with the OS, and no mobile SSH. Because of these drawbacks, and more, it was not really able to compete with the Blackberry in terms of email functionality.

The Blackberry I have a love hate relationship with. I love the way your inbox operates like a pager (if you want it to), and the speed you can get and send emails. You can also become fairly quick on the keyboard, and they character set available with one push (instead of click, select) is designed with email writing in mind. On the other hand, 3rd party software support is useless, and shows no signs of life, the web browser is woeful, and the PDA functions were stuck somewhere between computer bronze and iron age. I had endless glitches with T-mobile and the device, which I could never be 100% sure were all network problems. And there was no mobile SSH (ssh obsessed? yes).

Now to the dream device. Or is it? the Treo 600. Harder to get than pink Ugg boots online, this thing is priced as though it is the phone above all other phones. You can find plenty of gushing reviews of the Treo online, so I'll just concentrate on the points that struck me, especially in comparison with the Blackberry. Note, because it is a palm OS phone, there is a wealth of software available, so you all know any basic OS flaws are quickly remedied with hacks and what-not.

Plus Points

• The keyboard integration with the Palm OS is pretty good. You rarely have to retrieve the (excellent) stylus in order to do anything. Although checking to-do items off the list seems to be a secret keyboard command. Since hand-writing recognition is not included, the keyboard cannot be ignored.

• The screen is very bright indoors, and the backlit keyboard looks cool, and is useful.

• Battery life is excellent, for a PDA phone, if not for a palm pilot. You can really fiddle around with the thing for an hour a day and still not have to charge it for five days. Charging is also fast, a matter of a few hours. On the other hand, I'm not playing mp3s, watching videos, or running games on it either. Not that mp3 playing or video watching is really practical anyway. And for games, well, get a gameboy SP!

• The speaker is excellent and the ring tone quality is great as well. The phone is capable of being as loud as you realistically need it to be, although the vibration mode is a little weak vs other phones.

• The pack-in browser is "good enough" for basic sites (using google, etc). I expect if you need more, downloading mobile Opera or whatever will work ok. It has two modes, one where the screen size is retained (wide mode) and the other where it tries to squash it down into a column (optimized mode). Unless you like watching "sending..." for hours, turning off images is recommended for all but the most basic text sites.

• Pack-in software to integrate phone and PDA functions is ok but not going to please blackberry users. Unfortunately you cannot sync over data, only USB and hotsync. I am unsure why they would not provide this kind of cool feature. Perhaps in a future release. Newer software should be designed to show the "integrated inbox" view preferred by blackberry, where you can easily watch a history of SMS, Email and Phone traffic. The Treo seems to think Mail, SMS and Phone are 3 different applications.

• The treo 600 appears to be very well made, it has a really solid feel. In fact, it feels like a million bucks, unlike the blackberry, which feels like 13 dollars 23 cents. It is a little heavy for a phone, iPod kind of heavy, but given that it is also your PDA, that isn't so bad.

• It looks like a phone! with the blackberry, I always felt like i was holding a slice of blueberry jam toast to my ear.

• SD slot wifi cards are available. Makes connectivity on the go easier than the blackberry, which has useless international data roaming agreements.

Minus Points

• Cheap pack-in belt-clip case is not of the holster variety. For something this expensive, I expected to have got a better hard case for it. And screen protectors. And a soft case. And a desk cradle. Instead the box contains the aforementioned horizontal clip-on-belt case, one charger, one USB cable, and that is ALL.

• The screen is nearly unreadable in daylight, especially in sunlight. The coating is rather reflective, and when in direct light, one must face the screen flat on in order to see anything at all. And this criticism comes in the middle of a new york winter!

• There is no scroll wheel. Scroll wheels are awesome for one handed operation of menus and so on. The Blackberry manages to squeeze most of its user interface into a scroll wheel with a push click, and a cancel button nearby. There is a "hack" for the Treo that turns the volume keys into a "sort of" scroll wheel, but it is less than ideal. Every one handed device needs a scroll wheel, in my opinion.

• There is no time display. Using your cellphone as a watch is increasingly common. Clamshell phones now provide a handy display on the closed case of time, sometimes this display is in color as well. The treo screen is off (completely black) unless you click the 'on' button - even then, the screen you were last at probably is not displaying the time or anything useful. Hacks will probably help here, but cannot create a small always-on reflective (rather than light emitting) screen somewhere on the device!

• The keyboard is small. Really small. Almost as small as those calculator watches from the 70s. I've still not got anywhere near decent typing speed on this keyboard, despite being used to two-thumbed blackberry compositions.

• The keyboard design is of the "what were they thinking" variety. See the keyboard? top marks for anyone who can figure out how to enter a comma just by looking at it No, shift full stop is NOT the answer. Also missing in action, underline. This key is hidden behind four key strokes. Just right for that email from your_friend_in_nigeria@yahoo.com! The tiny numeric keypad is also how you enter phone numbers. On a blackberry, where the keyboard is "big enough", this isn't such a big deal. But using your right thumb to type an 11 digit number is no fun, at least not for a few months until you get more used to it.

• SMS message handling appears to love duplicate messages. Or t-mobile does. Or the sending network does. It is very hard to debug these things. However, since having the treo 600, 30% of my SMS messages have appeared twice (minutes apart), compared to none with the blackberry.

• The camera is rubbish. I mean, really rubbish. Handspring must have got a container load of CCDs meant for wheaties-box giveaways. There are no tuning options for white balance, etc, it is terribly slow to adjust for dark or bright areas, and the results in either are nearly useless, even by the standard of phone cameras. The latest japanese phone cameras are now shipping with mini video-lights, so you can light up your drunken friends face in a dark bar to associate their picture with their number. No such fun with this phone.

• Java doesn't come with the browser, or on the phone. No cute down-loadable java programs. I'm sure somewhere in Palm land this is remedied.

• Currently no way to use the keyboard/phone as an SSH client. I've tried both SSH programs that are out there, and they do not appear to realize that there is a GPRS (data) connection available, or attempt to use it. I'm sure with a plug-in wifi card in the SD memory slot, they would work, but I was expecting something would already be there for this. I am not sure if this failing is also with the Sprint version of the phone. I want my mobile SSH!

• One channel GPRS data. Or whatever the standard for "slowest" is. The browser, after wasting lots of time talking to Nokia proxy servers that T-mobile kindly sets up to save themselves money and introduce delays, operates at a top speed of no more than 40kbit, but unfortunately that is best-case. Sometimes the proxy server goes off completely (no service), sometimes the data part of the t-mobile GPRS network is just slow, and the data comes in bursts, and the request latency rises to 10 seconds or more. This does not make for comfortable web use. Be prepared to be thrown back into the time of 14k modems, using sites on the other side of the world! Again, perhaps the Sprint data network would do better here. Or perhaps not. The AT&T data network is reportedly capable of much better performance here. In my view, the single worst part of mobile data is the latency that currently exists. Waiting 5 seconds before the first byte of a web page (or WAP page) arrives is simply unacceptable. Mobile browsing will also suffer with comparison to home broadband because of this.

• No bluetooth.

Blackberry phone vs Treo 600



The black and white 6210 is a very unexciting device. You pay your money (a lot), and get a basic inbox and a basic email address and a very basic PDA. It is good for sending and receiving emails all the time. Some people probably can operate their entire email box from it, only resorting to a PC when they get big attachments or have to create and send attachments.

The newer color Blackberry is hardly more exciting. The screen has got better in resolution, and is reflective as well as backlit - so you can read it on a street corner in the blazing sun as well as indoors - but otherwise, the functions are pretty much unchanged over the previous blackberries. Again, a pure email junky would be better served with a blackberry.

I also found the blackberry to be flimsy, both in construction and in mechanicals. The older black plastic blackberries where much better in this department.

The treo, e-mail excluded, beats the blackberry in every way. The sheer quantity of interesting Palm software, the ability to download modifications to the OS, all the specialized applications available that relate to your field, there is really no comparison. In fact, the only reason the Blackberry is still around is its push mail system.

On the Treo, the lack of pager-like email, the necessity of telling your mail client to "call home" every N minutes (at expense of battery, possibly data charges, if you are charged by byte), make it a poor mobile mail box. On the other hand, you can turn on IMAP mode and point it against a much more complete IMAP mailbox you maintain elsewhere.

The Treo is also let down by the poor state of the T-mobile GPRS network. Even single channel GPRS should just not be this halting. With a smoother, low latency, gprs data network, the treo would be a more useful device. T-mobile also cripples the blackberry browser as well.

Usage (rather than idle) battery life on the blackberry is always likely to be longer than the Treo as the former has a reflective screen and the latter opts for a back-lite.

Summary: if you MUST have an email arrive buzzing on your belt within 1 minute of it being sent, then the only solution so far is the blackberry, (or perhaps the danger hiptop - a device I am not familiar with), if you can arrange your life so only SMS and phone calls are "vital" communications, and email can have an hour delay at most, then the Treo 600 beats the Blackberry (and the Sony P800) hands down.

I look forward to someone writing a mail server add-on that will generate SMS messages to users when their account gets new emails, that in turn would trigger a treo 600 application to accept the incoming SMS, and initiate a data connection to pickup the waiting emails. This is not a complicated bit of software to write. If this kind of software can be offered, the remaining plus points of a blackberry vs the treo, are the scroll-wheel, and the better keyboard.

Conclusion

Despite the negatives, I'm very happy with the compromises, and look forward to seeing some cool Treo 600 only software appear on the Palm sites. It is quite a pleasure to download a PRC directly from the mobile web browser, and see it install immediately.