News

• The Good: A nicely designed smartphone using the Windows Mobile operating system, with excellent software enhancements from Palm; it has plenty of memory, and an SD expansion slot if you need more
• The Bad: A low-resolution screen and a camera that takes drab pictures; no built-in Wi-Fi
• The Verdict: Palm has come out of the gate with a good product, a thoughtful marriage between Palm's hardware and Microsoft's operating system. But it needs improvements
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I pity smartphone manufacturers. They have to dance to the tune of telephone companies, who want to add all sorts of new services that can be sold separately to embellish the telcos' bottom line; and to the pop-music culture of the customers themselves, a fickle lot who tend to place as much importance on a telco's subscriber plan as on the smartphone itself. The result is a twice-yearly manufacturing cycle — in six months, the cellphone you signed a three-year contract for becomes just another wallflower at the senior prom.

Palm has just released the Treo 700wx, which has outshone an earlier model, the 700w, released in the United States in January. That phone had a memory problem — there wasn't enough of it, and that made for a slow user experience. The two are essentially the same smartphone, but the 700wx has gone to the gym and returned pumped with 64 MB of silicon to flesh out its 312 MHz Xscale processor. This smartphone runs on Microsoft's Windows Mobile 5 operating system, and 64 MB is the minimum RAM required.

Why has Palm made the change to Microsoft Mobile instead of its original Palm OS? There are plenty of reasons, but I suspect mostly because Palm has lost a chunk of its corporate market to Research in Motion's BlackBerry, and wants to have a product that integrates easily with corporations and small businesses running the Microsoft Exchange e-mail server. (Interestingly, RIM and Palm have just performed a marketing pas de deux; while Palm's Treo 700wx is waltzing into the corporate market, RIM's Pearl has been making pirouettes for the consumer market.)

Anecdotally, the buzz had it for years that Palm's cellphone was better than RIM's, while RIM's "push" e-mail technology was better than Palm's. The 700wx's Windows Mobile operating system is designed to work with the Microsoft Exchange e-mail server's Direct Push feature (it's built into the Windows Mobile system), and so should at least match, if not exceed, the performance of RIM's BlackBerry Exchange Server (BES, pronounced "bez").

Whether it will do that remains to be seen — and I suspect Palm might have to woo the corporate customer for some time before everyone's ready to switch to a Windows Mobile system. That's because the change has not been quite a perfect one.

As a personal information manager, the 700wx performs well. Its pint-sized version of Outlook synchronizes well with most computers using the included software (except, alas, for Macs), and handles e-mail, multimedia messages, short messages, contacts, calendar, tasks and notes.

Windows Mobile was born in the pre-smartphone era, and was designed primarily as an operating system for handheld computers; it had to be adapted for cellphone use. The adaptations weren't enough for Palm, which added its own improvements for the 700wx. Palm's improvements will search for a telephone number as the user starts typing a name, and can dial when a user taps on a photo of a contact (the 700wx has a touchscreen). Two programmable "soft" buttons on the front screen come configured for voicemail and a 411 directory, but can be reassigned as the user wishes.

These are excellent ideas — Palm usually thinks things through properly. But by embracing Windows Mobile, Palm has taken on a ferociously large operating system with a voracious appetite for memory. It contains pocket versions of copy-and-paste editing, the ability to view and edit Word and Excel files, view PDF and PowerPoint files, and the ability to save images and sounds from the Web and play them back via the integrated Windows Media Player. Along with games, a camera, the ability to act as an MP3 player, a slot for more memory, Windows Live instant messaging and other things, the whole unit is a little unwieldy.

It is, in short, trying to be all things to all people.

The 700wx itself is also something of the bad boy at the school dance — next to RIM's delicate Pearl, it's a heavyweight, measuring 13 cm by 5.8 cm by 2.3 cm, and weighing in at 181 grams (in contrast, the Pearl is 10.6 cm by 5 cm by 1.45 cm, and it weighs only 88 grams). It sits, however, very comfortably in the palm and can be operated easily enough by one hand. But you won't hear Palm boasting, as it used to, that the 700wx will fit nicely in a shirt pocket.

The heft made our office wag wonder whether the 700wx needed to be this size just to accommodate the Microsoft operating system.

This barb was not inaccurate, because Windows Mobile 5 shares a couple of problems with all Microsoft operating systems: Aside from being overloaded with features, it has a bunch of different ways of doing any one thing, which can create confusion. Just try to figure out the various ways the Treo 700wx can connect to the Internet — your choice of remote NDIS host, Wi-Fi SDIO card, NE2000 compatible Ethernet driver, virtual Ethernet intermediate miniport, PPTP NDISWAN Miniport, or L2TP NDISWAN Miniport.

There has to be a less complicated way.

Frankly, I prefer the old Palm OS, as apparently did Palm itself — when PalmSource, the separate company that made the operating system, went up for sale a few months ago, Palm tried to buy it back, but the bidding drove the price too high. And that was another reason Palm switched to Microsoft.

Moreover, Palm has also cut back a bit on the screen resolution from what it had been on the old Palm OS. Most smartphones have QVGA 240-by-320 pixel screens, but Palm stuck with the square screen it used on its Palm OS Treos, at a lower 240-by-240 pixel resolution, a strategy apparently made to accommodate the 35-key QWERTY thumb keyboard. But Windows Mobile does not support square 320-by-320 displays, so the resolution was reduced to 240 by 240, which is even lower than on the earlier Palm OS Treo 650 and Treo 700p.

The lower resolution doesn't affect most of the features on the 700wx, but when you start getting into things such as games or reading (much less editing) longer documents, it can result in eyestrain. I tried playing Klondike Solitaire on it, and I tired my eyes trying to differentiate between the black and red suits.

I don't quite understand the logic behind this. Palm has obviously ditched its obsession with ultra-thin devices some time ago, and frankly I would happily settle for a larger smartphone if it meant a bigger screen. Accommodating a standard 240-by-320 screen would have made the Treo 700wx deeper and probably a little heavier, but I doubt it would have made it unmarketable.

The resolution problem also affects looking at pictures taken by the built-in camera, a 1.3-megapixel affair. Not to put too fine a point on it, the camera is a disappointment. The pictures are dark and drab, and just plain terrible in low-light conditions despite a feature that offers seven brightness settings. The quality improves somewhat after using the built-in picture editor, another feature that seems to be out of place on a smartphone. Not that cellphones are expected to have great cameras, but the cost of sending pictures by e-mail should make the 700wx user pause before sending pictures of such low quality.

I also found the camera's shutter speed a little slow: Click to take a picture, and the camera sometimes takes as much as a half-second to respond. By which time the subject could have changed, and the moment lost.

Images can be saved to internal memory or an SD card in one of three quality settings. The Treo can also shoot video with or without audio. Video colour is also flat.

A nice touch is the ability to use the Treo 700wx as a mobile modem, but I would have preferred a built-in Wi-Fi wireless connection; this is, after all, a cellphone working on the CDMA system, a protocol not as frequently used outside of North America as GSM. And yes, you can plug a Wi-Fi card into the card slot, but that's an accessory.

In the meantime, it has dial-up networking, so you can use it hooked into the phone line — a quaint touch for such a cutting-edge phone.

One nice feature is a slider switch on the top edge of the unit, which turns all sounds on or off; the device automatically switches to vibrate mode when the switch is off. This makes it easy to shut the phone off quickly when entering meetings or going to the theatre.

There's a lot to like about the 700wx, despite some of my sharp criticisms. It's a handsome device, certainly one that will attract a lot of people who want to step out onto the dance floor with it. Just don't expect it to be able to dance to every tune you play.