Palm Treo 700w - gray (Verizon Wireless)

Reviewed by

Bonnie Cha

on 01/24/2006

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In addition, the Palm Treo 700w includes some new phone features that should make mobile professionals smile. First, say you're in a meeting and an important call comes through, but you can't get to it. The Treo 700w lets you reply with a text message to let callers know you received the call but were otherwise engaged. We checked out this text function, and it worked wonderfully. The Treo 700w also supports photo speed dial, which you can quickly access from the Today screen, and lets you call contacts by photos, as well as a user-friendly, icon-based voicemail app that supports numerous systems at work or home. While we love these added phone capabilities, we should also note that you can now enjoy these same features on the Treo 650, thanks to third-party developers. An app called SharkMsg by Ludus Technologies can perform the same "ignore with SMS" duties of the Windows Treo, and Electric Pocket has developed a program called PhotoDial that allows for photo speed dial.

All that said, we have to give the advantage of one-handed operation to the Treo 700w. With the combination of the useful shortcut keys and the Today screen, we could perform most operations without having to break out the stylus--truly convenient for working on the go.

Get ready for your close-up: The Treo 700w features a 1.3-megapixel camera and a self-portrait mirror.

For entertainment, the Palm Treo 700w includes Windows Media Player 10 Mobile, so you can listen to music and watch videos, plus it supports WMA, WMV, and MP3 files, among others. Also, for extra kicks, you can now assign any supported video file as a ring tone. If you want to take photos of your own, the Treo 700w comes equipped with a 1.3-megapixel camera, an improvement upon the Treo 650's VGA camera. There's a 2X zoom, and you can choose from three quality settings (High, Normal, and Low) and five resolutions (1,280x1,024, 640x480, 320x240, 240x180, and 160x120). You can also adjust the brightness, and once you've snapped your image, you can rotate it or crop it to your liking. Image quality was decent but definitely not printworthy. In video mode, you get two quality settings (176x144 and 352x288) and brightness controls. Plus, you can choose to limit video clips to 15 seconds, 30 seconds, or none at all. Once you're done, you can assign your masterpieces as wallpaper or photo caller ID, or you can save them to the phone's internal memory. There's 128MB of memory (60MB is user accessible) onboard, but thanks to the SDIO/MMC expansion slot, you can load a nice memory card with such multimedia content and save the internal memory for other apps.

We tested the dual-band (CDMA 800/1900; EV-DO) Palm Treo 700w in Las Vegas and the San Francisco area using Verizon's network, and call quality was excellent. Conversations were loud and clear on our end, and our callers reported the same. Speakerphone quality was a mixed bag. While everything was fine on our end, callers said we sounded far away. We had no problems pairing the Treo 700w with the Logitech Mobile Traveller Bluetooth headset, although call quality diminished slightly. Powered by a 312MHz Intel XScale processor and EV-DO support, the Treo 700w had no problems surfing the Web, and load times were fast.

The Palm Treo 700w's battery is rated for a talk time of 4.7 hours and a standby time of 15 days, which is decent for a phone. In CNET Labs' tests, we met the rated talk time, but standby time fell short by about 5 days. According to FCC radiation tests, the Treo 700w has a digital SAR rating of 1.26 watts per kilogram.