Palm Treo Pro (Sprint) Review

Editor’s Note: Portions of this article were taken from our original review of the Palm Treo Pro.

Palm’s Treo Pro made a bit of a splash when it was introduced as an unlocked GSM phone in August 2008, but its price ($549) was too steep. Now this elegant smart phone has returned, offered through Sprint with a much more palatable $199 price tag (with a two-year contract). However, with more feature rich devices such as the HTC Touch Pro already available, and with the highly anticipated Palm Pre on its way, has the Sprint Treo Pro already been eclipsed?

Design

Dressed up in glossy black plastic, the Treo Pro is refreshingly pocket-friendly, weighing a mere 4.7 ounces and measuring a svelte 0.5 inches thick. Dark, metallic buttons decorate the perimeter, including a thin volume bar and another customizable key on the left, a power button and ringer on/off switch on top, and a dedicated Wi-Fi launch key on the right side, which has a small infrared window beneath it. The back of the Treo Pro is where you’ll find the speaker, along with a 2-megapixel camera and a silver Palm logo.

One feature we’re glad to finally see on a Treo is a 3.5mm jack, which means you can plug in any pair of earphones. It’s on the bottom of the Pro, along with the micro-USB port for charging and syncing the device. The microSD/SDHC Card slot and removable battery are behind the cover, which we found difficult to remove.

Display, Buttons, and Keyboard

Part of what makes the Treo so relatively thin is that its 2.5-inch, 320 x 320-pixel touch screen is flush with the front of the device, as opposed to previous Treo’s, which had protruding bezels. The screen has a very reflective surface, though, which made it hard to see under bright lights. Touching this run-of-the-mill resistive screen with a fingernail yielded decent accuracy, but you’ll get better results with the short but sturdy stylus.

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The Treo Pro has four dedicated shortcut buttons that surround the circular five-way navigation key: Windows (for quick access to Programs and Settings), OK (mostly for minimizing apps), Calendar, and E-mail. We had to train ourselves not to use the Windows and OK buttons as soft menu keys; you have to press the soft menu keys that are on the bottom of the screen. Flanking all of these shortcut buttons are the Phone/Send and End buttons, which are subtly backlit green and red, respectively.

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While the Treo Pro has the same number of buttons as on the Palm Treo 800w, their more roomy distribution means less real estate for the keyboard. The layout is wider than the Palm Centro’s, but the keys have the same sticky, toy-like feel, and they’re packed too closely together for rapid, error-free typing. We much prefer the keyboard on the BlackBerry Curve 8330.

User Interface

The Sprint Palm Treo Pro runs Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional. The home screen has a Microsoft Live Search bar instead of the Google one found on the original Palm Treo Pro. When you click the Start button you can quickly access your most recently used applications, or open your Settings and Programs folders.

Touch plays a big part of the UI: you can close applications using the right drop-down menu on the Today screen, touch the address bar to enter Web addresses, and fire up the speaker with a tap while on a call. The camera app also has some nice touch-enabled shortcuts.

Apps

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Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional comes with Office Mobile, which you can use to create Word Mobile, Excel Mobile documents, as well as make edits to PowerPoint documents. A separate OneNote Mobile application can be used to create quick notes.

Sprint included Kinoma FreePlay, an excellent application for viewing photos from your collection, Flickr, and Picasa. You can also use it to listen to your stored music, Shoutcast radio stations, or for subscribing and playing podcasts and video podcasts. A Wall Street Journal application on the desktop launches the Audible audio book player from within Kinoma FreePlay. The Audible player is only a free three-month trial, though, so it felt more like bloatware than a useful application. Likewise, a YouTube application on the home screen launches the Kinoma FreePlay software. The full version of Kinoma Play ($29.99) includes Audible, as well as the ability to play videos and access services like Live 365 and iDisk.

One of Sprint’s oversights was not installing Opera Mobile, an app the original Treo Pro had. It’s all the more surprising considering that the Sprint Music Store application required Opera Mobile, so we had to install it ourselves. (Sprint claims that Opera Mobile is not necessary to use the Sprint Music Store.) This is likely because Internet Explorer Mobile 6, the latest from Microsoft, is installed on the phone. We’ll revisit this topic in the Web section.

There’s an icon to install WorldMate, a free app that helps you stay up to date on the weather, offers currency exchange information, and more. The Gold version ($9.95 per month or $99 per year) offers upcoming flight information, your active itineraries, the weather, and more while traveling.

Syncing

As with all Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional Edition devices, the Treo Pro uses ActiveSync for synchronizing Outlook contacts, Calendar entries, tasks, notes, and applications. Like the original Treo Pro, the software for installing ActiveSync and Windows Mobile Device Center is included on the actual phone, so you simply need to plug it in to trigger the setup application.

E-mail and Messaging

The Treo Pro supports Microsoft Exchange direct push e-mail, but you can also setup a POP/IMAP accounts or configure scheduled mail delivery from providers like AOL, EarthLink, Gmail, and Yahoo thanks to Windows Mobile 6.1’s easy setup process.

Sprint includes AIM, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo! messaging support on the device. We were able to sign into our AIM account quickly and were pleased that it delivered alerts to us while we were using other applications. You can also view each buddy list by switching quickly and easily between tabs.

Web Browsing

The Sprint Palm Treo Pro is the first available device with Internet Explorer Mobile 6 installed. It lets you view Web pages in both Mobile-Optimized and Desktop view, which means you can view sites the way they were meant to be displayed on a computer. We could easily pan around larger sites, like ESPN.com, and quickly zoom in by selecting an area with the target box. The toggle option is good for when you just want quick headlines from CNN.com using the mobile version, or the full version at other times, like when you’re within range of a Wi-Fi access point.

IE Mobile 6 reminded us a lot of browsing with Skyfire, except that full Flash support isn’t offered. However, this browser supports Flash Lite, which let us view the full YouTube.com Web site. Unfortunately, the screen size on the Palm Treo means watching the full videos is nearly impossible without scrolling around. Stick with the mobile version.

Click to enlargeUsing Sprint’s 3G EV-DO network, we loaded m.CNN.com, ESPN.com, and NYT.com in  6, 5, and 7 seconds, respectively. With Wi-Fi enabled and the browser set to desktop mode, the same sites loaded in 58, 49, and 73 seconds, respectively. While we could interact with these pages after about 30 seconds, that’s still too long for our tastes, and the browser crashed once while we tried to load the New York Times’ site; we had to restart the phone to resolve the issue.

Overall, we much prefer using Skyfire or Opera Mobile on Windows Mobile, which is a shame considering that Microsoft has been working on IE Mobile 6 for quite some time.

GPS

Sprint Navigation, powered by Telenav, is the same GPS application that was loaded on the original Treo Pro, and is available at no additional cost with Sprint’s Everything Data plans. When we had the phone pinpoint our location, it took about 18 seconds to find us, but then asked which street we were closest to. It was able to locate us, but not pinpoint our exact location until we identified the street we were on. After that, Sprint Navigation was able to guide us correctly from our house to an intersection at the train station.

You can also load the free Google Maps onto the Treo Pro, which is a good option for location search or for keeping up with friends using its fun-to-use Latitude feature.

Camera

The Palm Treo Pro has a decent 2-MP camera, but it doesn’t have flash or autofocus. Photos of a co-worker in our office were decent, and some shots were sharper and brighter than the BlackBerry Curve. However, shots of a bowl of Skittles were washed out; the colors weren’t vibrant and the picture was blurry due to the lack of autofocus and macro mode options. We suggest using the Palm Treo Pro’s camera in an area with plenty of light to get the best shots, but don’t expect frame-worthy photos.

Music and Video

The Treo Pro comes bundled with a few of Sprint’s over-the-air services, including Sprint TV and the Sprint Music store. We tuned into CNN Mobile and thought the quality was better than usual: voices were in sync and the video was fairly fluid. While the picture was pixilated, the service is fine for tuning in to live news for a quick update.

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The Sprint Music store offers tracks for 99 cents each; We downloaded a 4.01MB song, Brooks and Dunn’s “Red Dirt Road,” in 95 seconds, about a minute longer than it takes on Verizon Wireless’ network. The Treo Pro doesn’t come with its own headphones, but it does have a standard 3.5mm headphone jack. Audio sounded full and was loud enough for our tastes, even using a set of budget ear buds.

Call Quality and Battery Life

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Conversations on the Treo Pro were clear, and the phone did a good job of handling background noises. A truck, which was idling behind us, could not be heard on a message to our landline phone. The only noise that snuck through was a few loud taxi horns. However, at full volume, we did notice the earpiece had a bit of a rattle to it, so we recommend keeping it just below that.

The Palm Treo Pro delivered decent battery life. We surfed the Web, checked e-mail, and made phone calls frequently during the course of a work day—starting at 8am—and the device finally started to warn us of a low battery at 9pm. With heavy use you’ll need to recharge daily. The Palm Treo Pro also idled for four days before its battery dropped under the half-way mark. 

Verdict

The Sprint Palm Treo Pro is a business tool and multimedia device rolled into one. In general we prefer the HTC Touch Pro, which offers a more compelling TouchFLO user interface, better keyboard, and a sharper 3.2-MP camera, but that smart phone costs $100 more. The Sprint Palm Treo Pro’s biggest disadvantage is that it’s launching in the shadow of the Palm Pre, which is one of the most anticipated smart phones in years and is expected to launch by the summer. Unless you really like Windows Mobile, we’d recommend sitting tight before signing a 2-year contract for the Treo Pro.