A while ago I wrote a review of the Treo 600, the hottest phone/pda tech gadget of late 2003 due in part to glowing reviews from tech columnists who'd been given advance units.

Three months later, T-mobile users are only just getting their units, Sprint customers have had theirs for a while, and Cingular customers a little less than Sprint. Has it worn well over the time?

In brief, the negatives I reported from my initial experience with the unit were: screen legibility in sunlight, keyboard usability and poor camera quality. Now I've lived with the device for longer I am a little clearer on what is right, and wrong, with the unit.

Screen

Buying and attaching a screen protector / contrast enhancer 10 buck piece of plastic did little for legibility in daylight. The Treo 600 is NOT a device for using outdoors for long periods. The backlit screen struggles in anything but a very shady spot. For the price, the device should come with the newer active/passive color screens that harness bright light outdoors yet are still back-lit indoors. Worse, the color resolution of the screen is low, making uploaded or snapped snapshots unpleasant to look at. Which brings us to the ..

Camera

My initial comments was that the camera was bad. Well, as people pointed out, the camera takes acceptable pictures in bright sunlight.

But terrible pictures in low light

As the screen is so poor in color resolution, showing people pictures, or setting one as a "background" is not satisfactory at all.

Connectivity

The Treo 600 is all about connectivity, right? Not so fast. There are a few unexpected drawbacks. Ok, the Treo has an SD slot, so it can accept WiFi and Bluetooth SD cards! Yes?

No Wifi

The Treo is apparently unable to power any SD-sized WiFi cards. The reasons seem unclear but relate to the design of these first run units not rated for the kinds of power the SD wifi cards offer. Without WiFi you are limited to whatever data services are available with your cellular plan. Any bundled plans that inclue WiFi hotspot access are useless unless you also own a laptop with wifi.

No Bluetooth

Unexpectedly, the Treo 600 Palm 5.xx OS also does not ship with any Bluetooth-SD card capability. There are a number of Bluetooth SD cards that fit into less capable phones for desktop communication and for wireless headsets. The Treo 600 is so far stranded with no capability to use these devices.
Rumors of a Treo 610, with BT support, are on message boards. Such a move would be a poke in the eye for early Treo 600 adopters. What are we going to do? shell out another 500 bucks to add something that should have been there to begin with?

Push email still an adventure

if you devote significant portions of your life to camping treo 600 message boards, you may discover some people having luck with Imchatter which offers some degree of email functionality other than "wake up every 30 minutes to ask your pop server if there is any new email". Nevertheless, the Treo screen, keyboard, and lack of a scroll wheel, mean high volume email receivers and senders will NOT find email nirvana.

Data and Voice together - no

At least in the GSM version of the Treo, if you are in data mode, the Treo will quietly send calls to voice mail. This is function of the GPRS class the device implements, and was a design choice. A more expensive design could have supported simultaneous voice and data.

Despite full TCP connectivity potential, network aware applications lack

The combination of slow GPRS speeds (slower than 56k modem) and absolutely terrible network latency (T-mobile - other carriers may be slightly better), means my dream of using a system admin console while out and about, is deferred until 2005. US GPRS as implemented by T-mobile (and shared with Cingular) is still very unreliable with dodgy DNS servers (site not found!), or no connection at all, with no explanation and no live status reports on t-mobile support pages. Pulling your Treo out to google for an address gets old quickly if one time in three the GPRS network proves to be totally unresponsive. As a t-mobile customer for years, I am convinced that they do not know how to run reliable SMS and GSM add-on services. They still seem to consider such services as "experimental" and thus are too relaxed when one of their internal servers falls over.

Network based hotsync

The Treo 600 does not document that it is capable of network based hotsync. By various incantations you can convince the Treo 600 to establish a connection to your home machine, while out and about, and sync to your desktop. With better documentation for this, the feature may have been a big plus for many Palm users with sync-addiction. The google cache for this procedure is here the original article is here but was down when I checked.

Conclusion

I'm keeping the Treo 600 for now because the keyboard is useful for SMS, the phone is a palm device and a number of diverting palm applications and databases can be downloaded easily (I play bejeweled on the subway to pass the time). But overall, I feel the device falls short of the expectation set by early reviewers and barring some *significant* software/firmware updates, the Treo 600 does not deserve its informal status as the "ultimate PDA-Phone-data combo". A basic color screen samsung clamshell on AT&T has more mobile data capabilities, and operates on a much faster data network, than the Treo does on either T-mobile or Cingular. A pocket PC or Wifi capable Clie is also more of a device for an Internet addict, than the Treo 600.

PalmOne recently said to the press the Treo 600 was the key to their future. If this is the case, they better have a new version in the wings that corrects all these drawbacks, otherwise their future is not going to be so assured.