The Globe and Mail

• 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.