Palm Treo Pro (Sprint)

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.

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.

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.