TV with DVR & Internet: $89.90/mo
CNET editors' review
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CNET editors' rating:
stars
Very good
Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 09/23/2002
- Updated on: 12/13/2002
- Released on: 08/15/2002
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| Using the keyboard is an all-thumbs affair at first. | The jog dial allows for one-handed scrolling and selection. |
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 Time to grow up: No cradle ships with the Treo. |
Like other wireless Treos, the 300 is comfortable to talk on, even though it's bigger than today's standard flip phones. Unfortunately, there's no slot for adding memory, so you'll have to live with the onboard 16MB.
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 Phony phone: The Treo's virtual keypad interface. |
The 300 offers the same blend of phone and PDA features as Handspring's earlier wireless Treo models. It runs on a 33MHz Motorola DragonBall processor and comes with 16MB of memory and Palm OS 3.52, both of which are nonupgradable.
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 The Blazer browser hearkens back to the early Internet. |
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 You can receive mail via Outlook or Sprint's Business Connect. |
Other e-mail options include Handspring's Treo Mail application, as well as third-party POP3 programs such as JP Mobile One-Touch Mail, which allows you to forward e-mail to the device from existing POP3 accounts. We also had no trouble getting our AOL mail after we installed AOL Mail for Palm OS, and we were able to send SMS messages to e-mail addresses and other SMS-enabled cell phones in the United States and abroad.
As noted, the PCS Vision Service plans aren't cheap. For this device, Sprint recommends a minimum of an $84.99 plan, which includes a pool of voice minutes, plus an 8MB pool of data. To be clear, when you're e-mailing or surfing the Web, only your data pool--not your voice pool--takes the hit. We suspect that in time Sprint will lower its prices or at least offer a bigger data pool for the money, but for now, these plans are much more geared toward business users than average consumers.
Another small warning: The manual says that you can download games and ring tones wirelessly to the phone, for an extra fee in most cases. However, at launch, Sprint was still working on making these capabilities available through a third-party company. For now, you can add Palm-OS games and applications, including one for creating ring tones, the traditional way--via your PC or Mac using the HotSync application.The screen is 12-bit (4,000 colors) and bright, but it's not nearly as sharp as the high-resolution screens found on Sony's CLIE handhelds. According to Handspring, the screen is transflective, meaning that it is backlit for use indoors but can also reflect ambient light for viewing outdoors. In our tests, however, the screen appeared washed out to the point of being unreadable in direct sunlight. Still, it's a big improvement over the monochrome screen that's found on the Treo 180, and it doesn't seem to adversely affect battery life.
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| Using your phone as an image viewer has its limitations. | Silence of the handheld: The Treo's ringer switch. |
Overall, the Treo 300 performs well as a phone. Callers said that we sounded as if we were on a standard cell phone, and this Treo is just loud enough when set to the highest volume level. We also appreciated the quality of the built-in speakerphone, which can easily be turned on and off by tapping an icon on the screen.
As with the 270, we were satisfied with the 300's battery life. In our tests using Sprint's network in New York and San Francisco, we managed to exceed Handspring's rated talk time of 2.5 hours by almost 30 minutes, and we came close to hitting the five days of rated standby time.
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