Palm Treo 750 > Reviews > Avoid like the plague

Author's product rating:   

Look & Feel	Poor
Memory / capacity	Satisfactory
Comfort & Portability	Satisfactory
Ease of use	Very awkward
Value For Money	Very poor

Advantages:	the camera is quite good
Disadvantages:	pretty much every aspect of the Treo 750

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

I was given a Palm Treo 750 as a gift from work when I asked for a replacement mobile phone and my delight turned quickly into frustration. Why anyone on Earth would want to pay £300+ for this useless piece of technology I will never know. Initial joy with a new gadget to play with and explore turned into seething rage within days.

Using the Windows platform the Treo 750 is designed to keep you in the loop 24/7 by allowing access to emails, a mobile telephone, word, excel as well as picture capture and video recording capability. Sounds impressive but the major flaw with this piece of equipment is threefold:

1-The icons are accessed using a stylus pen on the TFT touchscreen display. Great I hear you say but you have to have the eyes of a well trained sniper to actualy hit the icon you want first time and invariably you will find yourself cursing as you move back from unwanted applications to the main menu for literally another stab at getting the icon you want. Even if you hit the icons bang on in the middle it seems to always access the icon to the left! Playing around with the screen alignment doesn't help one jot. Summary = ARSE

2-Once installed onto a network emails should sync with the Treo every 15 minutes so in effect, if popular with your colleagues every 15 minutes you should be bombarded with a series of emails. This would be all very well and good if it actually worked like this but it doesn't. Only once have emails arrived without me having to do a manual reconciliation which takes an absolute age and has the effect of draining the life out of the battery. So, want to use it to access emails on the go? Tough luck.

3-The battery would stuggle to power a bike lamp for 5 minutes let alone a power hungry monster like this. The battery when fully charged lasts for in the region of 8 hours with modest usage. If you do a manual update of emails regularly you can knock this down to around 6 hours of full charge. This wouldn't be too bad if when the battery drained it was just a case of recharging but if you let the battery and reserve battery drain completely guess what? Yes, thats right, it wipes everything - your user details, the link up to your inbox, stored documents. You name and it floats off into cyberspace. Not very good if you are away from a USB charger or plug socket.

I looking for positives and this is a struggle I have to say I was quite pleased with the quality of the 1.3 megapixel camera. The pictures are clear and the colour capture is really spot on. No problems here.

In brief: Avoid like the plague and look at a more reliable business tool likle a BlackBerry or an XDA.