A sleek design, smart shortcuts, and strong call quality make this premium unlocked smart phone worth owning. Palm has finally released a smart phone that isn’t bulky. In fact, the unlocked Palm Treo Pro looks downright elegant compared with previous Treos. And you get an integrated touchscreen, Wi-Fi, and GPS. The keyboard could be better, but with its reliable call quality and reasonably speedy 3G data, the Treo Pro is one of the top Windows Mobile smart phones on the market. Too bad it costs so much. Via. GizmoAve.com
Dressed up in glossy black plastic, the Treo Pro oozes executive class. And it’s refreshingly pocket-friendly, weighing a mere 4.7 ounces and measuring a svelte 0.5 inches thick.
We’re glad to see a 3.5mm jack on the bottom. The microSD/SDHC Card slot (up to 32GB) and removable battery are behind the cover, which we found difficult to remove.
The 2.5-inch, 320 x 320-pixel touchscreen is flush with the front. But there is less real estate for the keyboard. The layout is wider than the Centro’s, but the keys have the same sticky, toy-like feel, and they’re still packed too closely together for rapid, error-free typing.
A new 400-MHz Qualcomm processor runs the show. Palm includes 128MB of RAM and 256MB of storage, 100MB of which is user-available. Overall performance with these components was pretty snappy, but some apps took as long as 8 seconds to load.
With support for push e-mail via Microsoft Exchange you can have new e-mails delivered on a scheduled basis from such common providers as AOL, Earthlink, Gmail, and Yahoo, as well as any type of POP3 or IMAP account.
Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional includes Office Mobile, which lets the Treo Pro handle Excel Mobile, PowerPoint Mobile, and Word Mobile attachments. Downloading them is still a pain, since you have to do a full send/receive to grab a single document.
Surfing the Web is quick, if you don’t mind the crude formatting of Internet Explorer. Over 3G, using an AT&T SIM card, NYTimes.com loaded in an average of 9 seconds, CNN.com Mobile took 7 seconds, and ESPN Mobile Web took 10 seconds. Over Wi-Fi, these sites loaded in 7, 5, and 5 seconds, respectively.
You can get your GPS fix via free Google Maps. For the full navigation experience, opt for the preloaded TeleNav GPS Navigator ($9.99 per month) with its better-looking maps and voice directions. Just be sure you have a clear view of the sky.
The images we took with the Treo Pro’s 2-megapixel camera with no flash looked pretty decent. They’re not 4 x 6-inch printworthy, but we appreciated the detail and balanced lighting.
The standard Windows Media Player Mobile handles music and video playback. Our Silversun Pickups MP3 track sounded nice and loud through the bottom-mounted speaker. Music also sounded full through the included earbuds.
The Treo Pro was loud and clear during our tests on AT&T’s network. Other callers commented that we sounded “pretty good,” and on our end the quality was close to that of a landline. Our only complaint was some slight fuzziness on the line during pauses.
If the Treo Pro cost the same as competing devices from HTC, RIM, and Samsung, we would probably give it a stronger recommendation. But the audience for this unlocked $549 device is pretty much limited to executives who want to stand out in a crowd with a flashier design. The lacklustre keyboard notwithstanding, the Treo Pro is a very well-put-together smart phone, with only minimal Windows Mobile lag. We hope AT&T picks it up and sells it for a more reasonable price.
