Palm Treo Pro (Sprint)

Pros: Hardware switch to silent mode

Cons: It's glossy, and black, but also very smooth. At times feels very slippery, and opening the case to get to the battery can be a pain.

Summary: I love my new Treo Pro. I have been using it for about 2 weeks and already plan to hold on to it for the long haul. Little, history, I have had the Origional Treo, 200, 600, and 650. This is the best of them all. I swtiched two windows mobile 2 years ago because... well the PALM OS is dead in my book. That aside, I really missed the treo. I think palm gets how to build a nice device.

Keyboard: Works great. I find for a thumb keyboard and now with some experience I can fly with it. Personally, I love the thumb keyboard. Perfect for one handed operation with little compromise.

Thin: This thing fits very nicely into the pocket and the screen guard is excellent. I dont even know I have it with me and I never accidently Dial anyone. It fits in the hand wonderfully.

Buttons.. Some devices are going away from having so many buttons. However I like the ability to launch frequent programs. The Pro is great at letting you customize. (You have many hardware buttons and some of them can also be configured to have an Option + Hardware button application bound to them)

Also, you have hardware button access to volume control and wifi.

GPS: Works great. I installed and worked right away.

Power: this device is not a power pig. With normal use I get a good run off it. Mind you, I use applications on it all day along and SMS extensively.

Camera: I havent used it. Frankly, it doesnt matter how many mega pixels any phone has, it still just a phone camera. Quality is never that good. But it is good enough for those fun quick shots.

Dislikes: well, the screen is a standard windows mobile device screen. I was hoping for a new device, especially manufactured by HTC it would have a bit more kick to it. However, its very functional and does what I want. One thing I love is how they built into the keyboard access to the brightness control. This is something all devices should have. Its really hard to increase the brightness if you can read the screen. No problem with the treo.

The ALT key on the keyboard allows you to access characters not on the keyboard, including accented letters for various languages. What I dont like is that its a little window that shows up with about 8 characters show and you scroll to see more. Well there are a lot of characters, it would be better if they just filled the screen so you can quickly find the special character you want.

Windows Mobile Phone Dialer stinks! This is true in my opinion for any windows mobile device. Its a phone, but you have to navigate often 2 to 3 screens deep just to get a phone number. For example, you start typing someones name and the dialer appears. It instantly starts searching for a name. Great! When you select a name by pressing enter, it pulls up their contact screen. (HUH???) yes, you now get to see more info about them. I just want to DIAL the phone number. Long story short, for simple dialing its more complicated than it needs to be. Second, the Windows Mobile phone dialer always seems unresponsive and slow. Its a phone... but the phone is slow. it makes no sense. This is not a critisim against the treo, but if this your first Windows Mobile device you will be a bit disappointed with this.

My Final gripe is that it uses the Micro USB Cable. I dont know why. All I can say is that about 90% of my small electronic gizmos use Mini usb and now I have a new cable standard to deal with. I am sure there is some value to it, but I dont see it. Yes, the connector is smaller, but the cable is still just as thick and just as long. So why I need a thinner (by maybe a few hair widths) I dont know.

I buy Unlocked version from $450 here http://astore.amazon.com/fivestaritems-20/detail/B001E96PK0
If you made it this far, thanks for reading.