With the Palm Treo Pro, we can say for the first time in a couple of years that we wouldn’t mind being seen carrying a Treo. Yes, Palm has released a smart phone that isn’t bulky. In fact, the Treo Pro (sold unlocked for $549) looks downright elegant compared with previous Treos. And unlike the BlackBerry Curve and Samsung BlackJack II, you get an integrated touchscreen. You also get Wi-Fi and GPS, features Palm’s previous GSM phone, the Treo 750, lacks. The keyboard could be better, but with its reliable call quality and reasonably speedy 3G data, the Treo Pro is one of the better Windows Mobile smart phones on the market. Too bad it costs so much.

Design

Dressed up in glossy black plastic, the Palm Treo Pro oozes executive-class smart phone (kind of like the back of the iPhone, but all over.) And it’s refreshingly pocket-friendly, weighing a mere 4.7 ounces and measuring a svelte 0.5 inches thick. The Treo 750, by comparison, weighs 5.4 ounces and is 0.8 inches thick. Nevertheless, it’s hard to praise Palm too much for finally catching up with older devices like BlackBerry Curve 8310 and Samsung BlackJack II.

Dark, metallic buttons decorate the perimeter of the Treo Pro, including a thin volume bar and camera launch key on the left side, 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. (Does anyone beam anything in 2008?) The back of the Treo Pro is where you’ll find the speaker, which is off to the left, the 2-megapixel camera, and a silver Palm logo.

One feature we’re glad to see on a Treo finally is a 3.5mm jack, which means you can plug in your own 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 touchscreen is flush with the front of the device, as opposed to previous devices, which had protruding bezels. We appreciate having the ability to 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. 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 this is the same number of buttons as on the Palm Treo 800w, the more roomy distribution on the Treo Pro 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.