I went into The Link, I was greeted with a variety of options, but the sales assistant swore by the Treo 600. He spent great time explaining the complexities of the phone. How the phone can suit everyone's way of life. And the cracking sales line "It's not small, but it's not big" was used, the assistant seemed proud of this revolutionary statement. I never quite had the heart to scream "MUPPET!" in his face. But I did go on his recommendation and purchase the phone. It cost me £99 sim free, which at the time seemed like a steal.

The phone itself is kind of funky; it has an ordinary telephone keypad with a large variety of letter keys and symbol keys chucked in around it. This created a proper qwerty keyboard. Unlike some PDA style phones that you need to get the machine to understand your handwriting, this little baby lets you type the words in allowing quick use of e-mail, text messaging and letter writing. The phone colour is sort of a graphite colour; it often looks black and often looks silver.

Other facilities of the phone are a digital camera; this phone offers by far the worst digital camera I have ever seen. If you're familiar with ebay, sometimes you'll see a item for sale with a picture that is impossible to make out. This is the sort of style picture the treo gives you. Pictures seem blurred and actually a little misty snd seedy, almost like seeing an image from a low budget soft porn movie. I took a photograph of someone and the image was not really recognisable, the only way you would identify the person was if someone had told you who it was.

The battery on the phone is sealed into the phone, you have to charge the unit as a whole. I put the phone on charge and left it to do its thing. 29 hours later I looked at the phone and it was still charging, I powered up only to find the total charge was only 27%. Every few hours I checked again, and it went up by 1 or 2 % on each occasion. 4 days from purchase and the phones charge was only 73%, and the life was very poor. One three minute phone call meant that the phone had its battery life reduced by 7%. I realised that there was an obvious battery problem but was not going back to a link for several days, so I decided to bare with it.

The third and final problem was the phone facility; the sound quality for someone receiving a call from it was appalling. I contacted several people all said I sounded like I was talking through a computer.

After the second handset had similar problems I decided to contact the Palm People, they were horrified that I had been able to buy the phone without a contract. That had no interest at all in the faults, the conversation was quite horrific. In fact they even threatened me with legal action against me if I failed to return the phone to The Link within 24 hours.