Palm Treo 750 - black (AT&T)

Reviewed by

Bonnie Cha

on 01/07/2007

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As far as voice features, the Treo 750 is a quad-band world phone, so you can use the device overseas. The address book is limited only by the available memory, and there's room in each entry for 12 numbers, e-mail and Web addresses, IM handles, company information, notes, and so forth. For caller ID purposes, you can assign a photo, a group ID, or one of 29 ring tones. In addition, the Treo 750 retains some of our favorite phone features first introduced on the Treo 700w, including photo speed dial, ignore call with text, and a user-friendly, icon-based voicemail app that supports numerous systems at work or at home. Other features include a speakerphone, voice commands/dialing, a vibrate mode, speed dial, dial by name, and text and multimedia messaging. Of the latter, the Treo 750 can now do threaded chat like the Treo 680, which gives you more of an instant-messaging experience.

As far as wireless options, there's some good news and some bad news. First, the good: The Treo 750 has built-in Bluetooth 1.2 with compatibility for the A2DP profile for stereo Bluetooth headset as well as OBEX (object exchange), wireless car kits, hands-free headsets, and more. The smart phone works with Cingular's TeleNav GPS Navigator service, so if you have a Bluetooth GPS receiver, you can pair it with the 750 and turn it into a handheld navigation device. It also supports dial-up networking (both via Bluetooth and USB), so you can use the Treo 750 as a modem for your laptop.

Now, here's where things turn a little sour. As usual, Palm decided to forgo Wi-Fi integration (the omission continues to baffle us,) and though it's easier to take with the support for Cingular's 3G/UMTS network, we're utterly disappointed that the Palm Treo 750 will not work on the carrier's HSPDA network at launch. As a little background, UMTS, which stands for Universal Mobile Telecommunications System, is a 3G technology and successor to the GSM standard, while HSDPA, an acronym for High-Speed Downlink Packet Access, is a 3.5G technology and the successor to UMTS. Both technologies are designed for better mobile phone performance by bringing broadband data speeds to your phone. But while UMTS enables streaming video and broadband Internet access with transfer speeds around 2Mbps, HSDPA improves upon that performance with the potential to hit up to 14.4Mbps (in reality, you'll average more in the 400Kbps to 700Kbps range). Clearly, it'd be great if the Treo 750 could support the faster HSPDA speeds, but that said, Cingular and Palm said they will offer a free HSPDA upgrade sometime in the first half of 2007. Better late than never, right?

Multimedia features remain unchanged. There's a 1.3-megapixel camera with video-recording capabilities and a 2X digital zoom. You get a basic set of customization options, including five resolutions (1,280x1,024, 640x480, 320x240, 240x180, and 160x120), a self timer, and burst mode. There is no flash, but the 750 actually did a decent job of taking photos in darker environments. Overall, picture quality was OK with fairly clean lines and acceptable color, but we found you really have to have a steady hand in order to get a nonblurry picture.

The Treo 750 comes equipped with a 1.3-megapixel camera and a self-portrait mirror but no flash.

Finally, Windows Media Player 10 Mobile is onboard, so you can listen to your favorite MP3, WAV, WMA, AAC, and AMR music files; you also get album art, and WMP 10 Mobile is compatible with all PlaysForSure online stores. The smart phone can handle MPEG-4 video streaming, and if you have TV shows recorded on your Media Center PC, you can transfer them to your device for on-the-go viewing. It also works with Slingbox. Unfortunately, the Treo 750 will not work with Cingular Music and Cingular Video at this time.

Performance
We tested the quad-band (GSM 850/900/1800/1900; EDGE; UMTS) Palm Treo 750 in San Francisco using Cingular's network, and call quality was a mixed bag. Our callers reported good sound, while they sounded muffled to us. In addition, there was a noticeable hiss in the background. Activating the speakerphone yielded the same results. While there were no problems on the other end, we could still hear a hiss that degraded the overall call quality, though volume was adequate. On the bright side, we had no problems pairing the Treo 750 with the Logitech Mobile Traveller Bluetooth headset.

Overall, we enjoyed relatively snappy performance from the Treo 750, though there were some slight delays when opening several Office documents. The Web-browsing experience was also good, as pages loaded fairly quickly; when the HSPDA support is added, it should give the download speeds a nice boost. We weren't all that impressed with the multimedia performance. Music playback through the phone's speaker was tinny, and we really had to turn up the volume to hear the track. Consequently, this made the song sound blown-out.

The Treo 750 is rated for 4 hours of talk time and up to 10 days of standby time. Sadly, the 750 fell short of the rated talk time by an hour.