Palm Treo 680

Priced for the masses but also designed for the masses, the Treo 680 ($199 with two-year contract) combines an affordable price tag with Palm's unparalleled ease of use. It comes with a revamped phone application and all of the other amenities that have made the Treo line so popular. The Treo 680 is also more pocket-friendly than earlier models, making it a very good choice for first-time smart phone buyers.

 

Design and Ease of Use
While not nearly as thin as the Samsung BlackJack or Motorola Q, the Treo 680 is certainly sleeker than earlier Palm designs, due in part to its internal antenna. The device weighs 5.5 ounces and measures 0.8 inches thick, compared with 6.3 ounces and 0.9 inches for the Treo 650. The 680 is also easier to hold than the 650, thanks to its tapered design and subtle grooves on either side of the device. All told, the phone isn't exactly sexy but feels a lot lighter than it looks.

 

In terms of design, Palm didn't mess with a good thing, as the Treo 680 sports the traditional five-way navigator button and spacious keyboard. The layout felt a little stiff on our tests, but you'll pick up speed as you break it in. You also get the familiar 320 x 320-pixel touchscreen, which comes in handy for everything from cutting and pasting text to tapping on the speakerphone icon in the middle of a call. We're not fans of the flimsy stylus, however; it worked fine but didn't feel like it would last very long.

 

The right side of the Treo 680 houses a flip-out door for the Secure Digital card slot (which some may prefer over microSD or miniSD, since most digital cameras still use SD cards). The volume controls and voice memo button, which can be set to access any application on the phone, line the left side of the device. As with other Treos, the ringer on/off switch is found on top, and the VGA camera, self-portrait mirror, and speaker are on the back.

 

Too bad Cingular doesn't sell the other three color options of the 680-crimson, copper, and arctic white. For that you'll need to pay an extra $100 and go through Palm's online store or retail stores.

 

The biggest difference between this model and the 650—other than its weight—is the redesigned phone application. Palm has created a new Favorites tool, accessible by clicking the star icon, providing speed dials, or shortcuts, to not only contacts but also to applications and individual Web pages. This menu is a cinch to edit, and you're even given an option to assign a letter to a speed dial, which you can press and hold anytime to activate you're within the phone application. For example, you could set it up so that pressing E will take you to eBay's homepage.

 

We also like how Palm has more closely integrated the contacts database with the phone app. Select the person icon, start typing a name, and the Treo 680 starts narrowing your search so you can dial. If you get a call while you're on the phone, the 680 lets you send a "Can't talk right now" note to the other party, which they'll receive as a text message. As with other Treos, text-message chats are displayed as threaded conversations—just like an instant-message chat—so you can easily keep track of who said what.

 

First-time smart phone users will appreciate the Quick Tour and preloaded user manual on the device (called MyTreo). If those options don't do the trick, Palm and Cingular  offer a special setup helpdesk program with free user support for the first 90 days after purchase. Just keep in mind that this support isn't 24/7; the toll-free number is open from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. Pacific time, Monday through Friday, and 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Pacific time, Saturday and Sunday.

 

Features and Performance
The Treo 680 carries over most of the Treo 650's specs, including its Bluetooth 1.2 and quadband world phone capability. One welcome upgrade is the bump in user-accessible memory from 32MB to 64MB, allowing plenty of room to download one of the thousands of Palm OS applications. 

 

When it comes to e-mail, the Treo 680 is a very capable device. It supports Cingular's XpressMail, Exchange ActiveSync, and Good Mobile Messaging. Built-in wizards make it easy to set up personal accounts using AOL, Gmail, Yahoo, and more. Business users will appreciate that, unlike Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone Edition devices such as the Moto Q, Samsung BlackJack, and the T-Mobile Dash, this device can open and edit Word and Excel files. (And you don't have to zoom in to see them.) The included copy of Documents to Go 8.0 supports Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, as well as PDFs.

 

Even without support for Cingular's high-speed HSDPA network, the EDGE-enabled Treo 680 surfs the Web at a pretty good clip, thanks to Palm's smart Blazer browser. You can start reading most Web pages within a few seconds, even if it takes the 680 longer than the Cingular 8525 and the Samsung BlackJack to completely download pages. Palm says that you should be able to stream audio and video, but when we tried playing a video on CNN.com, the browser got stuck, and we couldn't navigate to another site until we reset the device.

 

If you want some entertainment on the side, go with the included Pocket Tunes application (for playing MP3s). You could spring for the Kinoma Media Player 4EX ($24.99), for streaming flash-based movies, or MobiTV ($9.99), for watching 50-plus channels of live TV, but we wouldn't recommend either option given the slower throughput of Cingular's EDGE network.

 

The VGA camera isn't as sharp as the 1.3-megapixel cameras found on competing smart phones, but at least the shutter speed is fast enough to capture fidgety subjects. The Treo 680 also makes sharing your photos easy; clicking on the envelope icon after you capture an image presents you the option of sending it via Bluetooth, e-mail, or multimedia message.

 

Overall performance was good but not stellar. We noticed a bit of a delay moving from one application to another, and sometimes it took a few seconds for our keyboard clicks to register. Call quality was excellent, even with the internal antenna. On a long-distance call from Manhattan to Boston, the other caller said we sounded clear. We didn't notice any static or hissing on our end of the line during other calls.

 

The rated battery life for the Treo 680 is only four hours, compared with the six hours of the Treo 650. During our tests we noticed that the 680 ran out of juice relatively quickly. The battery meter went from three-quarters full to nearly empty in about a day, which means you'll have to bring the charger home on the weekend. Still, we assume most users are willing to live with shorter endurance if it means having a sleeker device.

 

There are now several sub-$200 smart phones on the market, but the Treo 680 does the best job of making it simple to juggle voice calls, messaging, the Web, and PIM functions. For Cingular customers, the HSDPA-enabled Samsung BlackJack is the best bet for style-conscious multimedia mavens. But the Treo 680 has broader appeal because of how intuitive Palm makes the user experience.