palm Treo 700w Smartphone (Verizon Wireless)

I've had this phone since December 2006. My husband got this for me because of its capability to synchronize wirelessly with our Outlook server. I would not buy this version of the phone, if you intend to use the phone heavily. It's so unstable. I can get by because I'm in the office most of the time with my desktop and office phone.

Here are 3 things that annoy me the most about the phone:

- I have to reboot the phone 2-3 times a week on average because it would just freeze. Sometimes it comes in clusters where I'm rebooting 3 times a day! It almost always happens when I need to make back-to-back calls and/or when I happen to place a call at the same time it tries to synch with the server. I don't want to have to wait 15 seconds between the calls.
- I haven't figured out how to silence the phone, if I don't want to pick it up at the moment. Even when press the button intended for this purpose, it takes a while (8 seconds) for the phone to be silenced.

The Palm Operating system is great. I used it for years. While I could open adobe files transferred to my old palm, I could not open pdf's attached to emails that I received on my palm.

It was rumored that the Treo 750W running windows solved that problem. But, how well could I expect palm hardward, on a verizon network to work with window's software? I was pleasantly surprised. The Windows software lets me do everything I could with my palm, plus more.

If you don't need to read pdf's emailed to you, and you love the palm OS, I would recommend the Treo 750p.



I am very happy with this product.



And it was true. The windows software for the treo 750

I've been a Palm user for years. When the smartphones came out a few years ago, I was excited to combine two items into one. At first I had the 650p, which was great. Unfortunately, I cracked the screen (my fault) and Verizon replaced it with the 700w, as the 650p was no longer being manufactured.

Ugh, what a nightmare. I would give anything to have the 650p back! The biggest mistake Palm ever had was putting Windows in their devices. As others have said, the 700w regularly crashes, won't pick up calls, won't even RING when you're getting a call in some cases, and has lousy signal strength. My husband's cheapie phone gets a perfect signal when my Treo only has one bar (we both have Verizon). And as another reviewer said, there's that weird thing with not being able to properly use call waiting.

I am now on my THIRD replacement, and this one just crapped out on me. Rather than send me a fourth Treo, Verizon is now sending me a XV-6700. We'll see if that's any better.

This phone would be okay if it truly would function as it was designed to do. Unfortunately, the Treo 700w malfunctions on a regular basis, thereby taking up so much of my time that I can't possibly spend the time to enumerate every individual user issue I have experienced in the year of owning the Treo 700W. The top two issues are 1) it often crashes and goes completely dead. An interesting trick, since there is no Power On/Off button. The worst part is not realizing I'm "off the grid" until I go to revive the dormant screen, and find I cannot. Usually, pulling and reseating the battery, or doing a soft or hard reset will bring it back. Other times, I haven't been so lucky and have had to send it in for a replacement. I wish I had been forewarned that the Verizon retail stores would not support the Treo 700W in any way shape or form. The only help available is to call in to a separate technical support line, and I found this very inconvenient. Sometimes it looks like it is fine, but it has frozen and no calls or text messages are getting through. The worst part of this is that there are no visual cues that anything is wrong. I know three other people who have had the same experience, and all three of them have accepted the considerable financial waste of this purchase as water under the bridge and have replaced it with a Blackberry, and appear to be living happily ever after. I will do the same just as soon as I my contract with Verizon is up, and I will say goodbye to them and to the Treo at the same time.

The windows mobile OS has completely ruined an otherwise good phone with a great network.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with Palm, or Verizon. But when these are combined with the Microsoft Windows Mobile, the phone has so many issues that I'm looking for the quickest way to ditch it w/o paying a fee.

I've tried to live with the issues for over a year but it is getting out of hand. Here's a list of the issues I've encountered:


month 3: phone would freeze on 30% of answering calls, especially when other applications are opened.
month 6: auto mail pull would fail for no reason, and would have to be reconfigured to work again.
month 8: 50% of calls won't pickup when the 'Call' button is pressed or screen button is clicked. It's a little better now but still happens.
month 12: sometimes phone won't make any sounds, even with volume and global sound switch turned on. It works after a while but it is unstable.

Among these instability issues, here are some general cons:
Screen is too small (240px resolution) for any real web browsing.
Real time push email isn't available unless you have access to a corporate Exchange server.
Always requires two handed usage. Most programs are not real usable with one hand.

I've had a Blackberry with Cingular for a short period, which was 100x more friendly and easier to use than Verizon. I ditched Cingular because of coverage issues, but the Verizon Blackberry now look like the best choice. If only they had those thin new Blackberries for Verizon.

I wanted to like this phone. I tried the earlier generation and got rid of it because it was so unreliable. I was talked into trying the Trio again because "it is SO MUCH BETTER NOW". It is not. It is a little better, but it is still a crummy phone. It crashes several times a week; it forgets its battery level occasionally; the signal is poor; and the very worst is its sound quality. People can't hear me well and I don't hear them well. The volume controls seem almost random to me. If I crank up the speaker volume for calls all the way up, I can barely hear people - if I put the ring-tone volume on low, I can hear my phone ringing in the next county.

There are some good things - my network guy says the new version isn't as horrible to manage and set up than the last one. The Outlook synchronization seems to work very well. I like having immediate access to my calendar, email, etc. But everything else about the phone, I just HATE. I really, really, hate this phone. Sorry, but I had to say it.


and here's why:

-Poor signal strength: i tried 3 models and when compared to cheap Nokia phones this phone has a really bad signal strength. i've even called VZ and they verified signal strength to be good in 2 key areas for me. my parents have two cheap VZ phones and their signal is double mine.

-Bulky & Large
-Heavy
-no USB output (need special cables to USB)
-Buggy - i've had to reboot it several times as suggested by VZ Tech support. it often doesn't ring goes directly into Voicemail. sometimes it freezes.
i'm a technical guy, i work for a telecom, and far from a technically ignorant retard. but i'm selling my phone faster than you can spell c-r-a-p.

James

I bought this phone mainly because I love cutting-edge gadgets. Before you slam that statement, I concede that the 700WX is not "iPhone" cutting-edge. But it is the best that Verizon has to offer. Why should you buy this phone?
1. It's hours of tweaking, hacking, customizing fun.
2. "Near broadband" is pretty fast after messing with WAP browsers and GPRS.
3. Verizon users can tether it to their laptops for mobile near-high-speediness-internet. Screw those pay-4-play hotspots!
4. All the gripes can be overcome if you're the kind of user who loves trolling forums for the latest tweaks and trying them out yourself.
5. The screen is small but bright and 65k colors makes MobiTV look GREAT! By the way, this app does in fact stream very, very fluid video to your 240X240 screen. Anime fans will love the "Ataku" channel.
6. It's got bluetooth.
7. Tons of apps out there to play with - Opera Mobile web browser, Resco Pocket Radio (works great!), games galore, etc.

And yes, I have had it only for 2 days but it's been a lot of fun so far. I've got it to pull email from my Gmail account, no prob. And yea, I've reset it tons of times but only cuz I've made so many modifications already. Heck, I even did a hard-reset to restore it to it's original setup! But I planned on doing that anyway after I figured what apps I wanted to keep.

The phone part was confusing at first (yea, yea - Steve Jobs i hear ya') but I got the hang of it. Texting and emailing was easy. And if you think the keyboard is nice, forget it. The buttons are small and dont' really speed up your texting or emailing. But then again, i've only been using them for 2 days!

Reason not to get it: you're not patient or don't have the time to customize this thing to your liking. (which most of us don't, i know)

Have fun.

PS. I upgraded from a Motorola Razr V3M. OOOOh how I grew to hate that phone!

The Treo is more phone than function, but even as a phone, it has major bugs. Believe me when I tell you that this phone has added much stress to my life. I've visited the Palm Knowledgebase and Support Forums many times to find out if I was alone, only to find many, many lost souls roaming those halls with so many "Treo Troubles".
To emphasize, the short list is
- Dropped calls when a Call Waiting call is ignored.
- Constant crashes.
- Continuous rebooting required.
- Malfunctioning features including the alarm, browser, voice commands and notes.
- The non-expandable, 32MB Program Memory limitation caused (IMO) much erratic behavior and system halts. The phone required rebooting, minimally, once per day.
- Forget about multi-tasking.
- Blue-tooth headset interaction required rebooting after every third call.
- Visit Palms Support Forums and educate yourself before you buy this phone!
If you're a PDA power user, you especially should steer clear of the Treo 700w if you wish to stay productive. It will not only hold you back, but it will aggravate you, break trains of thought, interrupt your workflow and make you wait in line at the Verizon store when you finally decide to abandon it and get something else.
Been there, done that.

No idea what everyone is complaining about. This phone is great. If you are not running the latest firmware, upgrade, you will be glad you did. I have had this phone for 2 weeks now and have NEVER had to reset it. I am a power user and use this device as a mini PC, I connect to work with the vpn client use remote desktop to reboot and check out servers with problems, I also use pocketputty to SSH into unix machines. I use email and text messaging like nobodies business, play music in the background, yadda yadda yadda.... NO Problems.....

I have been incredibly frustrated and disappointed with the Palm Treo 700W almost from gthe beginning. Even when it was operating "properly," it froze and hung often several times a day requiring a soft reset. The keys were difficult to use. It was incredibly clumsy and difficult to access the means to turn on the speakerphone, and the awkward key system to capitalize letter and/or find punctuation beyond a basic few was a real disincentive to using it. Then the phone got buggy and the touch screen stopped working for a couple of days and Excel decided to spontaneously, making it even more frustrating. Verizon's 24/7 data support team has been incredibly helpful, but the problem got worse making this product useless to me as the replacements sent to me no longer could access my critical e-mail, which an enterprising Verizon tech finally figured out was due to a security software change that Palm made recently in it's 1.10 version of software effectively locking out some POP3 mail entirely and making the rest sporadic and unreliable. I am so done with item and am getting ready to select the replacement. Even one of the replacement batteries I bought was defective in that it only had about 40 minutes of life in it from the beginning. I do not recommend this and was told by some data techs that had I asked them they would have steered me to another product based upon the problems customers have had. Expensive mistake at close to $600 if you're not due for a "one free every two" discount from Verizon (which would still be pricey even if so with the $100 or so credit).

It would take too long to describe how bad my customer service experience has been with Amazon. Suffice to say if you have ANY problems with your order or service - count on it being YOUR problem and NOT Amazon's. There is no accountability for any problems you may have, but if you can accept that, the Treo 700w is a nice phone (with some limitations as described by the more tech savvy) - however, in my opinion NO PHONE is worth the amount of time and aggravation I have spent dealing with [...]. Go directly to the wireless provider and ditch the middle man.com.

If you're a former Blackberry user, like me, you'll likely hate this phone. If you're a former Palm PDA user, you'll hate this as a PDA (and probably as a phone as well). My company recently switched from the Blackberry platform to Windows Mobile. For secrity reasons, the only device initially approved for use on the WM platform is the Treo 700W, so I had no choice but to go with this dog. It tries to do everything but ends up doing nothing well. My review will focus on a comparison with the Blackberry platform (I was using a 7290).

Cons, compared to the BB:

-- Small cramped keyboard with clumsy dome-shaped keys that are much slower and more cumbersome to use, and which impede accurate typing.
-- Awkward implementation of shift and function keys; one major flaw is that the only way to type a capital letter is to use the shift key; you can't simply hold down a letter key until it produces a capital, as you can on the BB.
-- Predictive typing is virtually useless. It seldom produces the most obvious word, i.e., the one you'd expect. Accidentally type a nonstandard spelling (easy to do, since it's so hard to type on this keyboard), and the prediction feature will repeat the new "word" until you select a similar word with different spelling.
-- Extremely cluttered interface. Doing just about anything involves navigating menus, and there's no scroll wheel, so you can't do it one-handed: you have to use the stylus.
-- Using the address book to dial a number is painful. Type in the first letter of a person's name - say "D" - and you'll get every name that begins with that letter, whether a first name or last name. To pick the name you actually want, you then have to navigate the list with the stylus. It's just a mess.
-- Instability. I have to reset the device 2 - 3 times a day; it constantly hangs.
-- The combination of the touch screen and the placement of too-sensitive volume keys on the side means that something unintentional is always happening on the screen (and with the phone). Try to place this in a leather holster (or extract it), and odds are you'll have changed the volume while simultaneously having switched to one of the multi-layered screens several levels down. It other words, pull this thing out of a belt clip or holster and you'll probably have to pull out the stylus and close a succession of two or three screens just to get back to the main "Today" screen (which is incredibly cluttered and counterintuitive).
-- Battery life is pathetic. Plan on having this plugged into a charger whenever possible. With luck, you might make it through one day of use, IF you don't make or receive any phone calls but instead just use it to check your e-mail and calendar. It's that bad.

Pros:

-- The footprint is more phone-like than a traditional Blackberry.

Once the Motorola Q is approved for service by my company, I plan to unload this dog and buy one of those. Whatever shortcomings the Q may have, they don't begin to rival those of the 700W.

I am a big fan of the concept of the PDA and rely heavily on technology in my business to stay in touch with the office. I had the Treo 650 and had issues with software bugs that tended to lock it up regularly (even after several replacement phones). With the release of the 700w, I thought surely the manufacturer has perfected the phone, and with a Windows platform, I can't go wrong. I WAS WRONG! In a nutshell (even after several replacement phones, hours talking to tech support, and a move to an enterprise server): Constant lock-ups, faulty syncs, and just bad-overpriced technology. Palm preys on the "techy" that wants the newest thing. 10 of my colleagues are having the same experience. Verizon is not to blame - when I get a connection, the clarity is excellent. I do not ever write these reviews, but anything I can do to dissuade someone from buying this PDA is my good deed for the day.

Okay, I have owned my Treo 700W for around two months now. I am writing this because I want a more correct and informed representation of Microsoft and Treo.

I have been a Nokia (Symbian) user for many years. So many years that I have begun taking that level of quality for granted. Since Nokia I have used Samsung, and This Treo. As far as usability and features being where you would expect, Samsung and Treo rank about the same, Very far behind Nokia.

My phone has crashed about once every two weeks due to some software locking it up. But that tends to be typical of any software that continously runs. It most often crashes when I am doing something and recieve a phone call. Which is the most annoying, but not life or death.

The MOST annoying problem is that when I call someone and am leaving a message: If they call me back (call waiting) I can NOT hang up the answering machine. Usually this my not be an issue because you can tell the first call goodbye and they will end the call. BUT: for the answering machine, this is a huge oversight!!!

I have big problems with the battery life. It wont go more than around a day without plugging in, and if you are using the internet or MSN messaging... just forget that you have a battery.

The Windows portion is Glitchy. Sometimes screen draws will over lap, or things dont get drawn properly, but a quick reset fixes that.

One sugestion is that microsoft adopt a sort of Nokia(symbian) OS to always run, then allow the Microsoft Windows Mobile to allow PDA functionality sometimes but be able to turn off the PDA functionality... this sort of layering could resolve alot of the Call problems by giving Calling a higher priority in the (object call stack) But for all I know they have already done this...

If you use MSN it is acctually hard to shut down. Often times you will shut it down and it will just pop back up. I have figured out that you have to "Sign off" Then Hold OK to "end the task" Then when turning it off you have to scroll down to "End All Tasks" because if you press the screen to turn it off, it just opens back up... (I think there is a glitch where the event handler of MSN is never hidden, even when it is not on top) This is very frustraiting...

So why am i giving 4 stars? well These are all annoying, but i am used to being annoyed by microsoft. The fact is that i know all of these things now, and i am able to navagate my phone, save my battery life, and recieve my calls with very little trouble.

The advantages of this phone are:
You can use the internet at very high speeds! I was at a pub quiz and we were able to look up the answers on google! It was alot of fun.
Microsoft have made several MSN pages which help you find locations and maps with relative ease... There is so much more to do with that, but for now... Its not too bad!
Plus as a software engineer, i can write my own applications for this phone.
Also, with my one gig memory card, i can load up with MP3s and it works just fine as an MP3 player...
The fact is this phone is one step closer to having my desktop everywhere i go, and my nokia could never do that.

But going back to the nokia... I still use my nokia for my alarm clock because the built in alarms of this treo just SUCK! its just buggy, unreliable, and quite... its just annoying!

so... bottom line:
If you want a phone, get a nokia... if you want a phone with email... get a blackburry or what ever, i guess palm treo 650 works well... But if you want to have windows capabilities everywhere you go, and recieve the occasional phone call as well, GET THIS PRODUCT.

What a disappointment this phone has been. I've been using it for heavy business use (4,000 minutes a month and unlimited data plan - averaging 1,500-3,000 MB of data transfers a month). I switched to Verizon after 12+ years with AT&T/Cingular because of this phone and the EVDO network. Now I am stuck with a $500 paperweight and a $175 cancellation fee to go back to Cingular.

The good:
The EVDO network and a small piece of software called "PDAnet" which lets you use the Treo as a broadband modem for your laptop or PDA.

The Verizon wireless sync made it pretty easy to set up my own "push server" without hassling with my internal IT group, but it does need to be rebooted every week or so or it will simply stop forwarding emails.

The Bad (highlights only):

Where should I start - there is so much BAD about this phone... The single biggest problem is the way it manag

I had a Blackberry and was comfortable with its instant "always on" email. Emails would arrive on my handheld simultaneously as when they'd arrive on my desktop. I swithed for the high speed internet and the promise of a better calendar and contacts. As promised, the internet is much better than the 1x technology. Don't expect broadband, but it is usable. Also, the contacts and calendar sections are easy to use. As a phone, the 700w works just fine. I like the speakerphone and blue tooth features.

Configures wireless sync is torture. I have spent literally tens of hours trying to get it to work correctly. To this day it can take half a day for an email to arrive on my Treo. If I had to do all over again I would look either at a newer generation Blackberry or at the Motorola Q.

I own a Treo 700w and a 700p. The former was purchased before the latter was available, and I would happily give it away free, but not to a friend.

I've been a Windows user for more than a dozen years, and have had multiple generations of Palm PDAs. The 700w ranks as the most troublesome.

The 700w has all the problems you would expect in Windows software, plus a bunch of its own. Supposedly it's being pitched to the corporate market as Windows oriented, but it's botched for that purpose. ActiveSync is not reliable like HotSync. I spent a couple of days, with many rounds of email to tech support, before discovering why I could sync to Outlook at work, but not at home.

There's a lot less software available for Windows Mobile than for PalmOS, and a lot of what is available doesn't work properly on the 700w because of its 240x240 screen. E.g., critical buttons wind up off-screen.

The interface has some vague resemblance to Windows, but is actually quite different from the desktop version, so there's no benefit there. I guess you could say it's "Windows-like" in that it's riddled with inconsistencies and "clevernesses" that you sort of have to discover on your own. (E.g., to see a list of running applications, press and hold the OK button.)

Several applications that apparently had nothing to do with Internet Explorer (e.g., Webster's Dictionary) nevertheless broke IE when installed, and had to be discarded (and then I had to do a hard reset on the 700w).

The standard sync software does not back up applications and settings, so I had to manually restore them every time I had to do a hard reset, which was much too often. Verizon implicitly recognized this as a problem, and in their first software upgrade included an application, Sprite, that does a pretty good job of backup--separate from sync'ing.

The 700w used about 30MB of memory for a set of applications that consumes only 10MB on the 700p, and memory usage was always pretty much unpredictable on the 700w, although I never actually ran out.

Having multiple active applications (even though only one could have the screen at any time) turned out to be more of a bother than an advantage.

I could go on and on. I figure I invested more than 80 hours trying to make a go of using the 700w before finally giving up. I do have a couple of nice things to say about it: It comes with a game--Bubble Breaker--pre-installed that I found to be more addictive than anything on a Palm, and KSE Backgammon is the strongest computer backgammon player I've tried.

The 700p just works. I've had a whole series of Palms, and in my experience they don't embroil you in software problems. My problem has been dropping them and breaking their screens.

On both phones, integration between Contacts and the phone is excellent. In addition to Speed Dial, you can pull up most contacts with two or three letters of the name, and then dial with a single button press.

The cameras on both are pretty good (1.3 megapixel) in adequate light, but have no flash. Interface and zoom are a little easier on the 700p.


I have had my phone for a month and have had no problems. The POP setup was easy, the broadband connected, the Bluetooth sync worked great. Palm did include an upgrade CD and it took me 2 tries to install that, but that's because I didn't follow the directions the first time. Palm seems to have worked out a lot of the earlier problems listed in these reviews. I have never had to reboot or had any space problems. Should you buy a memory card for it? Of course. I thrilled that I don't have to carry a phone, pda, and camera. This is a great product.


Palm - 700w - Verizon Model
I've been using this PALM TREO for a couple months now and would recommended to others... look very hard at this phone and rationalize why you want it before stepping forward. The hardware in itself seems very solid and reliable.

This TREO package has several great items. And if you're looking at it to use Microsoft Mobile and the Palm calendar function, to Sync to Outlook and staying current on appointments and events. These features of pretty solid. Battery life and performance is pretty good. If you're a RIM or Blackberry user the Keyboard is a snap and easy to use. The pointer stick keypad is a nice feature too... The display is fair and you can see it in most lighting situations other then direct sunlight. Be sure to buy screen protective covers.... And a couple of the programs I've purchased to run on MS mobile work well, as long as you only run one at a time. Speakerphone works OK, but the Mic picks up all background noise.

The very first thing when you get your TREO ... look for MS updates and flash the phone. My Phone was delivered direct from Verizon with an older operating release installed. Palm had posted a new release two months prior. With current updated there's still several irritants. As a long time Verizon customer I don't see these issues as their base cell phone service problems. It appears to be Palm & MS. And I would expect the same from other providers, I know of a couple Sprint users stating they're seeing the same issues. My opinion as a customer, if Verizon wants return customers I would be leveraging Palm to correct the issues or buy back or exchange these phones from their customers'.

And like all items we spend our hard earned cash on! .... We tend to migrate to gravitate to the negative items.

1. Microsoft Mobile tends to work like most MS operation systems. It locks up and requires a reboots on a regular basis.. I've learned just to soft boot the device weekly to reduce the issue. Even with the most recent OS update.

2. Most of the TREO functions & options have very primitive settings and functionality. If you're used to Motorola & Blackberry phones and use the many options and phone tools, You will be disappointed! Palm is lacking this flexibility. You're forced to buy software to do some of the task you might be use too. This device has a lack of memory issue, which will cause you problems too. You can pretty much expect to be able to load about 100 addresses, phone numbers and a couple very small MS Word docs before you run out of memory. Running the application from a SD card works well until you bump the card and it ejects. You can expect the MS Mobile to crash 30% of the time.

3. I've tried several different Bluetooth ear pieces and in general the phone does a poor job in connecting and managing the devices. Sound quality is poor, did I say poor!. I've used every device Palm and Verizon has recommended. And if you get more than about 8 feet from the phone it goes out..... In addition at least once a week the Bluetooth device setting get turned off and need to be reactivated.

3. Phone connectivity is questionable. If your switching from a TRImode phone you will drop kick this phone. Dropped calls will be a part of you daily route until you re-learn the digital coverage areas. Forget about call waiting. It drops the calls and will disconnected the holding party most of the time. I used and all digital Motorola phone and it out performs this TREO phone in service connectivity.... and sound quality by a large margin.

4. Phone connections and dialing take longer and seems to have a very long pause when connecting to outgoing calls. There is also a lot of sound quality delays, sound pauses and cutting out in the middles of conversations. Unlike some phones there seems to be no noise cancellation or filtering in this device. It picks up all background noise.

5. Voice dialing.... Forget it. Not worth setting up..... Other phones are a snap and work. This one is too temperamental.... It selects the wrong names.

6. MP3 Player ....Don't expect to store MP3 on the base memory. You will be forced to use the storage card due to the memory constraint device. And as a point, the player library manager seems to repetitively default back to main memory and you can't find your music. The the MS Player has a very low sound quality, even with excellent headsets...... Expect to by a jack plug converter. The plug is smaller then those on MP3 players..

7. WEB browsing is extremely slow and if you choose sites other than the Palm sites you can expect to wait longer. And many of the Websites do not show up correctly. Event those setup for PDA's. There is a lot of WEB(Digital) signal dead areas. I've experienced a lot of dead digital signal areas where my Laptop Verizon Digital Card has excellent signal. Must be another poor Palm software item. The phone does not multiplex well. It has problems managing the Phone, Web and PDA items if you trying to run them all at the same time. Odds this is due to the lack of base memory or slow processor.

The bottom line is.... I'm not sure I would venture into the MS Mobile phones unless you know what you want to use it for. I feel this is and emerging market and still in development. And it will be a while before it becomes a great product. Time will tell. I plan to keep the TREO 700w. Because it is to late to return it! But I would take my money back and try something else if I had the chance.. One last note..... The joke commercial Verizon continues to run when they say "Can You Hear Me Now" .... You will be using this line a lot with this phone. It cuts out allot...

I've been using the 700W for about a month now, and I'd have to say that I am pretty happy with it. I have never used a Blackberry, PDA, or other hand held, so I can't compare to these devices. But there are features of this phone that I really like, which I won't go into because they are probably things that any first time PDA user would be happy with (being able to import my entire Outlook contacts, e.g.) I will say that I am a gadget freak, so I am pretty demanding on technology tools/toys.

There have been a few frustrating things:
- The web browsing is not very good. Seems to connect very well, and fast, to the list of favorites that come standard with the phone. But try typing in any website thats not in the favorites, and you have a 50/50 chance of an error and/or a lockup.
- Even on "High Quality" setting, the 1.3MP camera does not produce very good pictures. Although I probably shouldn't expect much from a camera/phone. I do notice that you have to keep your hand incredibly still (as well as the subject) to get a decent picture. I've checked this on various settings thinking it had something to do with the exposure speed, but it's pretty much true on any setting combination.
- Oddly enough, the call functions on this phone are not great. When both dialing out, and when answering incoming calls, there are frequently LONG pauses after hitting a button and before you either get a ring on outbound, or get to talk to someone on inbound. This can be very annoying.
- The free Motorola bluetooth earpiece that Amazon includes for free apparently sucks. Everyone I have spoken to when I am using this device says they either cannot hear me, I sound like I'm under water, or they can hear every other word I say. I see this earpiece on people all the time, so I don't know if it's just a combination with this phone, or I just got a dud.

Overall I really do like the phone, despite the items above. It has made me more efficient when I'm not in front of my laptop. It is easy to navigate and intuitive. I would recommend it to anyone.

Got this a little over a week ago...I've never used a smartphone before...Therefore, I don't have any prior experiences with any other product. So far, the device has been as advertised, it's everything that I've been looking for. For people who are familiar with the Windows platform, this phone will be an easy transition. It took me about a day to discover all of the features on this phone. Our organization run Exchange 2003 SP2 with FE/BE topology and the email setup took all but 5 minutes. The "push" technology is also as advertised! I actually get my emails faster on my phone compared to my desktop Outlook! Operation on the device can be done with mostly one hand, MS and Palm did an excellent job on the usability of the O/S. There are some shortfalls though...The screen is smaller compared to the 700p. Start of some programs is a little slow (Windows Media Player). The 700w seems to be a little short on memory, although I've only had to reset 1 time in 10 days of operation. Battery life is a little short. However, overall, I would definitely recommend this to anyone who's looking for a smartphone.

bought this phone 6 weeks ago direct from Verizon, I just received my 4th replacement and it still has problems. First unit crashed, second unit had a dead keyboard right out of the box, in the third and fourth units the modem won't hang up automatically so if you use it to automatically check e-mail it will stay logged on until you remember to turn it off. Tends to block calls and burns up battery. When the phone does work, it is very slow. I could tolerate that if it was stable.

I am trying to get my money back from Verizon.

If you buy this phone you will be sorry. I've exchanged the phone 3 times. Finally I asked for a refund. I just want my old phone back. Told, "no refund is possible". Verizon has lost a devoted customer for the past 4 years. DO NOT TAKE a chance on this phone. Especially if needed for business like me.

I suggest everyone looking at this phone to go with the recently introduced Treo 700p. It runs the familiar PalmOS operating system which is much easier to use than Windows (specially on the small screen), and features a higher screen resolution (320x320 in the 700p vs. 240x240 in this 700w running windows).

The 700p runs PalmOS Garnet (5.4.9) sports Bluetooth v1.2, dual CDMA (800/1900Mhz) and EvDO on CDMA2000. Compatibility with Office files like Word, Excel and Powerpoint files is achieved using Documents-to-GO bundled software.

The 700p supports MultiMediaCard, SD & SDIO memory cards, up to two gigabytes. Plus, the 700pýs digital camera sports 1280x1024 res. and does video recording 352 x 288. It also has automatic ligth balance.

In short: avoid this 700w that gives you lower resolution and a more cumbersome OS and go with the Treo 700p running Palm OS, just released in mid-May 2006.

I have had TREO phones for about 4 years and will never buy another one. The quality control on their products is terrible. I have never had a phone last more than 9 months before it became unusable - The TREO 350 had a flip up lid for the screen and that broke off in 2 separate phones and once that happens, the phone is worthless. Treo and T-Mobile refused to replace it again and forced me to buy another phone without any kind of upgrade discount. The second model was a Treo 600 which I bought 15 months ago. It was replaced because it continually freezed up and required a manual reset about once a day. Many phone calls were missed because of this. The replacement phone also locked up, but to a lesser degree, but this phone appears to have suffered some type of internal heat damage and the screen is becoming unusuable. The company only warrants replacement phones for 3 months and I had this one for 5. Once again, they refused to offer me a discounted upgrade and T-Mobile would do nothing. So I am forced to buy another phone - my 3rd in 4 years - and it will definitely NOT be a Treo. I am forceed to stay with T-Mobile or face a $200 early termination fee for both my cell phone and my air card. I have filed a complaint with the State of Florida, where I live, against both T-Mobile and Palm, but I'm not holding my breath that anything positive will happen. But beware, neither one of these companies appears to care much about their customers.

You need to be a computer savy to use this Phone. If you can operate your Computer well, buy this.

I was long time user of Treo 600 and was in a dilema to Swtich 650 or 700w. My roommate got a 650 through Sprint, the phone is great , but still old palm OS. 700w got Windows Mobile, but poor hardware compared to 650. I want to try Windows Mobile, and bought this Amazing Thing.

The screen is Only 240X240, But still not bad. I didnt see much difference between 650 and 700w.

Need to close the Application right after using them, Like closing in "Task Manager" in Computer Windows. I have no idea why Windows Mobile doing that.

The Camera is really Cool. 1.3 Meg Pixel , I am not a Camera Phone Fan, But started using this Cam.

The Key Pad is better than 600 and 650.

Option to install lot of Applications, Comes with Windows Office, I installed MS Pocket Streets and its working Really amazing.

Bluetooth is Okay.

No Wifi, That very disappointing.

Sending Mails or Internet, Directly Connects to Verizon Broadband. If you dont want to use VZW Broadband, Check manual and change it.

Too bad, No case is delivered.

*** I am from FL, Got a phone number from CA, Verizon cannot transfer Phone numbers from West, I was upset, But still i got to compramise because of the phone ***



I've owned virtually every Treo since Handspring sold the ingenious device to Palm and unfortunately the company and its executives have done nothing but milk every dollar they can for their bonuses and kill the franchise in the process. I really wanted to like this phone and tried every workaround. Unfortunately it goes back later today for many of the reasons Alfredo Gomez refers to. Other than a reasonably good form factor and hardware - which other companies have now caught up - Palm has made very few changes. DO NOT BELIEVE MOST MAGAZINE REVIEWS -- they are half done hack jobs by people who barely use the phone and write up their experience on specs and a day of usage. It's not the normal experience and I will explain.

1) Just not enough RAM -

If you are in any way using this phone as anything more than just pulling an email account and occasional surfing, this phone is not for you. In addition to Microsoft themselves recommending 64MB of RAM and the fact that EVERY PDA and phone for the past year and a half has at LEAST 64 MB of RAM, Palm foolishly decided to go with HALF that number -- the same 32 MB of RAM that was available to users in their Treo 600 released in 2002!!! This was greed. With Windows Mobile this even more of a problem because it was built to multitask -- keep your applications open in the background and called to the front on request. Opening and closing bulky applications is SLOW in Windows Mobile. With the 700w you get about 14MB of RAM to run applications before you put in the necessary minimal add ons, which will reduce your memory by at least 1-2 MB. But the real problem are memory leaks in WM 5 which will reduce that number even more. Add the fact that the 700w will QUIT applications when you get to the 5MB level, this will mean that your device will not multitask and you might have 2 apps open at the same time, maybe even 3 if they are not memory intensive. If you have open your email program and may have surfed using Pocket IE recently then opening your contact manager like PocketInformant will take you at least 5-10 seconds. You will hate that rotating colored ball. THIS CANNOT BE CHANGED as there are no RAM upgrades. I need to reset the phone at least once a day to clear the RAM.

2) SMS and Email problems: If you will use SMS or email frequently, this phone can make you pull your hair out. There is a bug (feature?) in SMS and PocketOutlook where scrolling down means the cursor goes to the bottom of the page view. Thus if you have a 14 line email or document you are editing, the only way to get to line 5 is to whip out that stylus or scrolling a few hundred characters to the right until you get there. Unfortunately the same goes for SMS which is NOT THREADED. This means that you can't see the ongoing conversation you may have with different people. It is by date, end of story. There aren't any suitable alternatives right now unfortunately. Nothing for SMS and the best email program I have seen is Web IS Flexmail which itself requires several keypresses just to delete an email -- unless once again you want to whip out that stylus. One handed operation is better than other WM devices but NOT EVEN CLOSE to the ease of using the Palm OS.

3. 240x240 screen is barely adequate if you use the web and infuriating with the limited number of apps that work with the 700w. On a whole it's better than I thought and not really a problem for most apps that use this resolution. Reading ebooks is a tad fuzzy but perfectly acceptable, even at smaller fonts. But squeeze that IE page into your tiny screen and the little fonts will be illegible. Want to view a power point for example? A word doc you received in email? With a 240x320 you see just enough to view a whole page and make it out. Not so with 240x240. It's just a little too coarse and you have to zoom everything. It's also a lot of info to cram into that tiny screen.

3) Windows Mobile has advantages and nice things about it but it is still NOT an optimal OS for mobile use. It is amazing that many tasks still require you to use a stylus or take an absurd number of keypresses. For example, if you want to simply save a number in your phone log you can just navigate and save. You must pull out the stylus, point and hold, and wait for save as to appear. Sure this isn't horrific but it becomes very noticeable when you do this regularly. If you ever used a Palm OS phone you will wish you could go back. Knowing Palm they will not improve the system in time and in a year or two Microsoft will FINALLY get this right.

WiFi is OK but very weak and almost useless with the external card. Bluetooth is adequate.

On the pros the battery life is reasonably good. Form factor is ok and the build quality is better than other phones like the xv6700. The screen clarity and contrast is also very good. As a phone it is acceptable.

So the end result is that unless you are a basic user that only wants to check an email account, doesn't get a lot of email, doesn't use SMS much, doesn't really use the PDA much, then this phone is not a solution for you. It will be nice to experience for the first 2 weeks and then you will begin to see the problems tear you apart soon after becoming familiar with the phone. It is sad that virtually all of these problems can be traced to Palm executives greed on trying to milk out just one more sale from an old phone that had a form factor that was the best for a long time. At this day and age consumers have a choice and need for more than just a phone that feels good in your hand. Don't be stupid. If Microsoft recommends that any application they provide needs 64 MB of RAM there is nobody stupid enough to even try to run it with less. That is the Palm Treo 700w.

I was looking for something that is compact and PDA phone, web access together. Had cell phone and ipaq and it occupied both my pockets.
So go for the best, I thought! Trusted on the Palm name and put over 500 buck; little that I know I was purchasing a nightmare.
Palm has clearly failed. They tried to build a spaceship and landed up building car,ship, plane combined that doesn't work. When I use this phone, I feel anyone can manufacture a product, ask customers to test for themselves and
then charge them a hell lotta money. Let me clarify with my experiences
The phone has small screen not so good browsing web but that is something you don't blame them. Here is a list to blame them
1. The phone hangs a lot of times and you never know its dead. I get people telling that you don't answer your cell. To reset it, you have to open back cover. Wow, you are driving and wanna make call, do you want to open cover take out battery?
2. The phone memory is 64mb. give me a break, with ram only 25 mb. most of the time with minimum applications you see only 1 or 2 mb left.
3. For basic stuff its ok, but people taking half grand phone expect more and to setup that is nightmare. I spend countless hours with tech support for sync problems, email setup, vpn (never worked)
4. Unfortunately I believed that phone does what is says and I tried syncing with lotus notes at office. My IT helped me but somehow it writes some long logs who knows why?
5. The MS voice command is not reliable. Sometimes works sometimes doesn't.
6. As I said before there are many factors combines here so at tech support microsoft, varizon and palm point to each other saying 'we are ok, its theeem'..
7. I have to say for most part, I got good support quicky and some support analysts indirectly agreed that this product has issues. But how do you explain that there are things not in the manual that you need to do.
8. The nevobackup does not work unless you reinstall everything again.
8. This tops it all - at the end of month,my 700w showed over half memory full and took a long time to sync even though I had a very few applications/information stored(you guessed correctly, I took my old ipaq out). So after trying few things with varizon, they transferred me to palm. This person was fast; immediatly he asked me to go to windows/temp and asked me to delete all files there -over 2400.
I asked him why the files are not automatically deleting? He goes 'its your responsibility to delete it'. 'Where is it written? in the user manual/website?'. 'No sir, you can call us and we'll tell you that'. It took long time to delete them. So I summerize that if you dont call you'll never know how your memory and speed die out.

I can go on with specific problems, but in short, be careful!

I have used Palms since the days of the Palm Pilot Professional, and there have been times when I've headed off to work or to run errands and realize I've left the darned thing charging or still hooked up to my computer. The same holds true for my cell phone. And with the two devices competing for space on my belt/waistband or in my purse, having both a phone and PDA was starting to be stressful. My husband solved the problem by getting me a Treo. It's taken a little practice to getting used to the thumbpad, but now that I have everything in one device I'm a happy convert. The very first day I had it, my doctor saw me puzzling out the odd beep and quickly whipped hers out and gave me a quick how-to tour! I still haven't had the time to sit down and go through the user's manual, but the Treo is very straightforward and easy to use, so chances are I may never need to read it. A great electronic assistant for those who are tech savvy as well as those who are a bit on the tech-phobic side.

I've been hesitating getting the Treo 700w for several months now, for two reasons:

1) I was with Cingular and I was waiting to see if and when they would add this phone to list of PDA phone offerings. I was also a bit hesitant to switch to Verizon, as many reviews I've read of their service, especially signal coverage in some areas, was pretty poor.

2) The cost of the phone, compared to how new it was. I didn't want to leap at new and untested technology and be both disappointed and $500 poorer (plus stuck with a 2-year contract) if it turned out to be a dud.

I had missed out on the PDA revolution a few years back and always thought it would be nice to have one, but couldn't justify the expense and the hassle of having to carry a cell phone, a work-issued pager AND a PDA all the time. So instead all my PDA "functions" over the past couple of years have been carried out by a 50-cent pocket-size spiral notebook.

The last straw was when I was sitting in the car on a Friday afternoon right after work, trying to call my wife to let her know I was outside her building to pick her up. Cingular's network, as is typical on a Friday afternoon, was flooded, and I wasn't able to get a call through despite repeated attempts. At that point I figured that Verizon couldn't be any worse than Cingular, so we went out to the Verizon kiosk at Circuit City the next day and set up our account.

This phone has literally changed my life. Not in any earth-shattering ways, but coupled with the unlimited EV-DO internet access (which I've speed-tested at up to 750 kbit/sec in a good signal area), I can take my web-browsing just about anywhere. The calendar and task list tools are indispensable to me. With the addition of Pocket Quicken from Landware.com, I can track all my expenditures on the go and sync up when I get home - no more tedious entry of a stack of receipts that I've been putting off for days or weeks, and then hoping I didn't forget any. I enter the transaction while I'm at the register and don't worry about it. With PDAnet from junefabrics.com I can use the phone as a modem for my laptop in a pinch, and speeds are quite impressive, all things considered.

One thing I don't like about it is that when it's set to periodically connect to check e-mail, it closes the internet connection upon completion... even if you were busy using the internet at the time. It's also running a version of Internet Explorer that identifies as version 4.0, which many web sites detect and redirect you to a page that says you need to upgrade your browser. It would be nice if Microsoft brought the Windows Mobile browser into the 21st century with an upgrade sometime soon. I tried running Minimo (a mobile version of the Mozilla browser) but it has lots of problems.

I added a 2GB SD card for additional storage and have a small collection of mp3s on it. They sound reasonably good, but a little tinny, over the phone speaker. I haven't tried using the earphone jack. A nice feature of this phone is that you can use your own mp3s as ringtones, AND you can use them from the SD card, they don't have to be resident in phone memory.

The other main shortcoming of this phone is the small 240x240 screen. Compared to the larger screen of the Palm phones in the Treo line, this is a big negative. Let's face it - this is a cell phone. You weren't really expecting to do extensive high-end web-browsing anyway. It's good enough to get by on though for simple tasks on the go. I've used it to look up business phone numbers and addresses, look up product information and reviews while standing in the store looking at the item in question, bought movie tickets through Fandango, and even posted on some message boards.

In conclusion, I'm glad I made the leap. The phone has enough compelling features for me to overlook its few (but not entirely insignificant) flaws, such as the small screen and some quirky behavior. I've been pretty happy with Verizon's service so far, especially the speed of the data connection which is quite snappy, and the coverage area seems pretty extensive... I haven't found many places where the signal is unusable (except when I'm inside the local supermarket... I have to say that it must be something to do with the construction of the building itself, because the signal is fine right outside the door).

If you are migrating from a Palm OS based phone, you should be aware that many things that you used to get "for free" via the web (such as time tables from airlines) you will now need to get from the web using your airtime data connection. If you don't plan to buy airtime minutes for web/email access for this phone, I would NOT consider buying this phone.

This is a point that is sometime missed when considering a Windows based mobile device over a Palm OS phone.

The 700w is a nice phone and has alot of features but accessing the Internet is not practical. The screen is just too small. You can only see about 1/6 of what a standard desktop displays. You can toggle to other screen parts but it's hard to put the "jigsaw" puzzle together (at least for me).
The windows outlook application is not feature rich. For VPN users beware that when downloading from your server the 700w doesn't allow you to save the message on your desktop computer. Once email is rec'd by the 700w it's only available in your phone. Original Palms with Palm OS have a better email interface with more flexibility.
If you're ooking to upgrade to this style of PDA my advice would be to wait for the 700p in May 2006. It'll have more memory, better resolution and Palm OS with lots of available downloads .

great phone it just needs more memory. haven't had any problems with the phone It does have poor speakerphone sound but a pretty good phone but don't give up the laptop yet.

In theory, this is a great phone. Unfortunately, it is woefully underpowered - enough so to make it unsuitable for most and best to wait for the next version.

I have used several units extensively and have spent hours online, with customer service, and with tech support. Read on for the some critical details.

Before I move on, let's clear up some confusions. Palm makes phones and PDAs. PalmSource makes software. They used to be one company but split up a few years ago.

The Treo 600 and 650 are made by Palm and use PalmSource software. The 700w is made by Palm and uses Microsoft software.

Also, there are two versions of Windows Mobile 5.0. There is a Smartphone version and there is a Pocket PC version. The Treo 700w uses the latter, which is more versatile but usually impossible to use with one hand. However, Palm made some modifications, with Microsoft's permission, to make the 700w very usable without a stylus. That's something to consider when looking at competing phones that also use Windows Mobile Pocket PC version.

Finally, EV-DO is technically broadband, but not quite what you have at home, thus why it is marketed as "near-broadband." Home broadband speeds are at least 768Kbps peak, and 3,000Kbps speeds are commonly available. Verizon's EVDO is 512Kbps peak. 1x, the old cellular connection that the Treo 650 uses, is only 100kbps peak.

Here are the major shortcomings.

312MHz is quite slow. Most leading-edge PDAs use a 624MHz processor now. Considering that the Treo does the job of both a phone and a PDA, nothing less than 624MHz is called for.

Palm really fell asleep at the wheel with the RAM. Only about 25MB ends up being available to run all programs. Windows takes up most of that and leaves less than 10MB available for the rest of your programs. Most new PDAs provide 64MB.

What does that mean? It means your unit will crash a plenty. PalmSource software may run fine with those specs, but Windows is much more of a power hog.

I put my unit through heavy use and it crashes at least once per day. Use too many programs at once - it will eventually crash. Surf the internet a lot - it will eventually crash.

Here's the worst one: If you're using an intensive program or have simply opened too many programs (doesn't matter if they're in the background) and you happen to receive a call - it will crash.

Given all this, I ask the same thing another reviewer asked: why isn't the reset button easily accessible?

I also frequently experience lags as long as 30 seconds. I have also experienced 5-second lags in the phone picking up an incoming call.

Unfortunately, the only way around this is for Palm to add more RAM to the Treo 700w. The only way to minimize the problem is to frequently hit [function key] + [OK key] to bring up the program manager and close all programs. Especially do this after you use intensive programs, such as Internet Explorer, finance software, GPS software, and music software.

Here's another problem that can probably be fixed with a ROM update: The unit sometimes shuts off certain sound sources whenever the screen auto-shuts off. This means you can't use it as a portable MP3 player. To get around this, open Media Player and assign a key to turn off the screen. Then turn off the screen before the auto-shut off and it will keep playing.

Here's a mind-boggling oversight: When you're on two calls at the same time (e.g. call waiting), you cannot end just one call. You have to end both. Moreover, even if one of the callers hangs up, the phone will still show the call as being active. I have yet to figure out if those minutes are being charged to me.

If you have the patience, this can still be a useful product, especially if you need the faster EVDO connection. Despite its fatal flaws, I would still say it's one of the best implementations of a phone/pda.

If you have a Treo 650, the 700w will be more of a downgrade if you donn't need EVDO. If you need Blackberry, the 700w is a laughable alternative.

My suggestion is to wait out for the next version.

*Update: Palm released a patch in April that drastically improves stability. It doesn't crash nearly as much as before. What changed? Memory management was improved to shut down programs instead of leaving them in the background, usually leaving only 1 program running at time. However, the opposite problem now exists where the Treo closes a program that you want to come back to (e.g. after retrieving info from another program or after receiving a call), which itself can be frustrating. But I'll take that over 3 daily crashes.

I bought the Treo 700w phone from the Verizon store in January 2006. This phone has major bugs in it. It hangs up about 3 times a week. I miss calls and I am only notified that I now have voice mail. Verizon has replaced this phone for me 2 times now. This is my 3rd phone and I still have the same problem with it.
Push Verizon to get $$$$ off of your monthly data service fee. I did.

Good Luck
Michael

Best phone I have ever owned.

We use Microsoft Exchange server as an email client and I have had absolutely no sync issues once I got the correct information from our network vendors.

Broadband speed Internet connection - almost as fast a my home broadband is great outside my house and anywhere as far north of downtown Dallas as McKinney.

Speaker phone is great. Conference calling and other phones features are intuitive to use.

Media player works seemlessly with the phone. It pauses the music or other media (i.e., video downloads when a new call comes in and picks up right where it left off).

The only frustration I have had is with getting the right bluetooth headset. I'm trying to eliminate "wires" from my life. I've tried 2 bluetooth headsets (the Palm Treo headset and the top of the line Plantronics) that work fine with the phone but won't play music through them. They are going back to the stores I purchased them at. I don't care about stereo sound, mono is fine with me. [If anyone knows of a bluetooth headset that has this capability I would appreciate hearing about it].

Verizon coverage works much better then any other service I have had from my home in McKinney, TX. (33 miles north of downtown Dallas). I've had both T-Mobile and Sprint in the past 6 years. They may be the same company now I can't keep up with the mergers in telecommunications industry.

I was a day late in getting my rebate information sorted out and called Amazon and when I spoke to the right person. He took care of my rebate for me and is suppossed to send and email confirming my rebate was processed and the check is in the mail. Amazon seems to have taken care of their rebate problems. I will update this review if I don't get my check by 3-25-06

I've had my 700w for a few weeks now, and wish I had my 650 back.
The phone freezes at least a few times a day, and I've missed a number of calls when it auto-configures itself into the "Paperweight" mode. You'd think Palm would put the reset button on the front of the phone, since it's so necessary.

Using the USB connection; the phone sync'ed quickly and flawlessly for almost a week. Since then, soft and hard resets, and reinstalling the ActiveSync program has done nothing but frustrate. I can't blame Palm or Verizon; as far as I can tell, all of the blame for the lack of functionality is Microsoft's fault. I'm wondering if the rollout of the Motorola Q phone is being stalled until Microsoft can eliminate a few of the bugs.

If you use corporate email and sync your email with your server, another annoyance is, if you leave cell coverage, or turn the phone off while you are on an airplane; the Active Sync program will continue to try to sync -even if the phone is off- until the battery goes dead. This does NOT take long. At the very least, Microsoft could have written AS (4.1) so it wouldn't try to sync with the phone off.
This phone was either rushed to market, developed by separate groups who never communicated, or development was managed by someone who never actually tried to use the phone for more than a day.

Looking forward to this 700w for quite sometimes. Sad thing is Verizon wants too much money out of your pocket and make nothing working on the unit for you. You have EVDO services and cannot use it as a bluetooth modem for your laptop internet access. You go buy the wifi card that doesn't work with any internet voip applicaiton or corporate PEAP-GTC network because it's asking for a personal certicate (no..root certificate wont work). You claim the rebate too fast. So you are stuck with the phone. What is good? My son likes the bubble pop game I guess that's the good part of it....and i use it to check the date and time. Man...what a time waste and a shame to have a product made with so many limitation. I think RIMM will take care of the corporate messaging world easily.


You can spend hours configuring this thing, adding music, pictures and various clever programs. Amaze your friends with sights and sounds! I added a 1GB SD Card and have movies of my kids (although there are a lot of menus to go through to play media from the storage card).

As a utilitarian phone it's marginal. I need to reset 2 or 3 times a day, and miss incoming calls once in a while since I don't realize it's "stuck" until I try to use it (which sometimes means I need to pull over, pull off the phone back, and find the reset hole with the scribe). This gets kinds of frustrating when you just need to make a phone call. When I hike, bike, or ski, it's too big, too fearful to loose / break, and since it does not have an analog mode it usually doesn't work away from urban areas anyway. Now I'm thinking of getting a second phone as a "traveler" (another $10/mo!), tri-band of course. Also, earpiece is not great, and mic is not positioned near mouth very well; doesn't work well in a noisy restaurants or noisy car (I drive a convertible). Another issue is "dial extension by name": there are no letters on the little phone number buttons.

I had BlackBerry in the past, don't expect this to take the place of that. The phone needs to dial in periodically to fetch email, not instant like BB. Will only fetch mail if it's not already downloaded by your main Outlook PC, although you could play games forwarding mail to another email account.

Also the MicroSoft media player seems to get hung up and crash the phone as well. Videos work best when they are rendered at 250x250 pixels, I assume the extra scaling takes processor BW (you can select custom pixel resolution in Window Media Encoder, more hours of fun).

Regarding the 250x250 image resolution, I see this as no issue at all, picture and graphics are quite sharp for this screen size. This seems like the wrong issue to be discussing about this phone.

I like the fact that I don't need to carry a PDA, phone and BlackBerry, but I do miss having a simple-to-use reliable phone, and BlackBerry with the scroll wheel. Just another gadget to make life more complicated. Wish it was more reliable, perhaps software upgrades will become available.

Also, you'll need to charge this everyday, especially if you play movies.


The reviewer who said there is not enough memory is correct. Palm completely blew it on that one. Turning the thing on takes 5 of the 11 MB it has to run programs. And the lack of built-in wireless? Come on. For that price it SHOULD have built-in G. Instead, it has nothing and the only card available is B and it is $100! Blue tooth works fairly well for me. Some problems occaisonally that require a soft reset but that is common with Palm. Wireless sync is cool once you get it working correctly. Had to call Verizon and have them walk me through downloading an update (how can there be an update-the phone just came out) for the wireless sync app, and then doing a hard reset to fix the crashes that it was causing. Voice recognition works-most of the time. For IT people, it has a Remote Desktop Client, but don't get excited... It doesn't do screen scaling very well, so you can't really see the screen. I was REALLY hoping that was going to work! It definitely has a lot of good features and is handy for professionals but it has its flaws, as well.

This was a nice try by Palm and I never thought they would actually use any other OS besides their own.

Overall, this phone had potential but it falls DRASTICALLY short in 5 areas!

1 - the builtin Bluetooth sucks.
It works and then it doesn't. Profile support is so limited on this device, I find it disgusting. Verizon (and I love Verizon by the way) is desperately trying to catch up in the Bluetooth arena. They sat on their arses for 2 years. Every other wireless service has excellent Bluetooth devices. If your a Verizon customer...like me...you will have to continue to be jealous.

2 - The screen is smaller than the Treo650. A crappy resolution of 240x240. Other similar devices offer 320x320. Good luck getting your exisitng programs to display properly! They don't! I have 7 programs that WILL NOT display properly. Palm says they are working on this. GEEE! Thanks so much! Thanks for releasing a test model to the public. You get R&D at our expense!

3 - No builtin WiFi. Need I say more? You'll have to spring for an expansion card. Ooops, there goes your storage!!!

4 - Weak, slow and poor performing processor.

5 - AND WORST OF ALL - NOT ENOUGH RAM !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Whoever the geniuses were that decided the amount of RAM that would be available for this device should be dragged behind a car over broken glass until they die. This hunk of junk only offers 11MB's available for programs. GET READY FOR (out of memory) errors galore!!!!!! I had 10 in the first 2 days. I had numerous crashes in my first week that reset the device so I had to reinstall some programs.


Overall, this is one of those stories of how a phone could have been great! It is almost there. Trust me when I say you will be glad you waited for the next version of this phone. I have read in numerous magazines it is due in the spring. SURE! SURE!!

I got this from from Verizon Wireless store about a week ago.
It took some time to get used to it but once you got used to it, you cannot live without it.

Some people above complained about ActiveSync but I had no problem with syncing with my Laptop using USB cable.. But later on, I realized that Exchange Server at work (Exchange 2003) already supports ActiveSycn via Wireless internet (EVDO)..

I asked IT to set it up from the beginning but they didn't respond right away, so I decide to type in OWA (Outlook web access) DNS name as server connection source and magically it started working!!!!

It means Microsoft bas been preparing this time to come from long time ago and embedded the secure internet sync already..

I surfed around the Microsoft site and figured out that Exchange 2003 SP2 even supports realtime email notification through SMS.
Once you type in SMS messaging address when you addn user server connection to ActiveSync, Exchange will send SMS message to your Phone, then phone start synchronization right away, which performs as goog as Blackberry.. But I didn't set it up since I don't need near-real time email notification, rather I want longer batter life (15minute sync interval was good enough for me).

About Phone feature, as others said above, it works perfect.
Well, actually from the beginning, I had difficult typing while I'm driving but I noticed that MS Voice command is installed. so you can make calls by simply talking to it.

I searched the Microsoft Windows Mobile blog site and found out that Voice command may not work well with Bluetooth device since it samples audio at 8Khz (MS Voice command was built based on 16KHz sampling rate).. But I will try with Bluetooth 1.2 headset to see if it really not working or not.

if not, then probably I need to wait until 16Khz version of Bluetooth headset comes out.

Anyway, overall it is great PHONE that gives all the network access and PDA feature you need.

I decided to drop Nextel because of the poor coverage; the Treo 700w was not yet released, so I thought I would try the 650 first, through earthlink wireless, as they had the best deal on a 650. Earthlink uses both the sprint wireless network and verizon depending on location. Coverage via Earthlink was excellent in the area I use it, northwest of Boston. If you're going with a Treo 650, I would recommend Earthlink.

The 650, as Walter Mossberg states in his Wall Street Journal columns, is an excellent phone. Mr. Mossberg, however, is a strong proponent of the Palm OS, and so I sensed bias in his review of the Windows 700 Treo. In spite of his review and that of others, I decided to give the Treo 700w a try. I am very pleased with the phone. I felt that it had the 650 and the Palm OS out-matched in every category. I do, however, think that the Palm OS has some great user-friendly features, and it's simple, and fast. However: if you want fast downloads and intend on using internet features, Windows Mobile 5 on the Treo can't be beat. I've used the internet features extensively for business and pleasure, and I'm very pleased with it. Mr. Mossberg derides Windows Mobile 5 for it's 'frankenstein-like' features. If you've used a windows PDA in the past, however, the quirks are at most a minor annoyance which quickly become irrelevant. I think that a new faster version of the Palm OS supporting EVDO will be a good competitor to the 700w, but as of now, the 650 is out-classed. If I didn't need the internet, and didn't need corporate email connections comparable to blackberry, I might re-consider, but for now, I'm keeping the Treo 700w, and I've returned the 650.

I'm not a great fan of Microsoft having had to write programs with MFC and deal with all of the bloated and buggy products that Microsoft continues to release. This Windows mobile 5, however, is not one of those dreadful releases.

The calendar program for WM 5 is not up to snuff and does not win when compared to Palm's OS calendar, but I solved that with an add-on from Agenda Fusion. There is also a nice add-on from Pocket Informant. The add-on calendars are slower, however, so Microsoft needs to do a better job of getting a great native calendar program similar to the Palm OS calendar. The Palm OS, for my purposes, still requires more add-on's than WM5, even with Palm's great calendar feature.

It will be interesting to see what comes next for the Palm OS; I think they can still fight windows if the next hardware release is comparable to the 700w.

The entire phone is integrated...you can email, call, text, pix msg directly from your contacts, you can link relevant contacts to appointments or tasks, you can browse web pages QUICKLY directly from a link in an email, you can view large attachments. It's ALMOST like having a full featured internet connected computer in your pocket PLUS it's a fantastic phone.
I only have 3 complaints.

1. Windows Mobile 5 isn't stable yet, every third party app I've installed has slowed the unit down to a crawl...fortunately the phone offers more than enough features that new software isn't necessary.

2. I use Louts Notes at work and there is no direct solution for this. What I've done is a workaround, work email is forwarded to a yahoo account I can access on my phone (yahoo gives me the option of sending from my work account) I was expecting a direct connection to and from work.

3. It doesn't offer the constant connectivity of a blackberry I thought it might, I have mine set to check @ 15 minute intervals, you can set it to 1 minute intervals but this eats up battery like crazy and is a constant interruption if you're using the phone

Overall, there isn't an all in one solution on the market that compares...BUY THIS NOW

Everyone who matters at all around here is carrying these things. Amazing how disruptive you can be with it. WHATEVER it is you insist on doing in public that you used to do it private, you can do it with this fine product. Well, ALMOST whatever it is you used to do ...
In any event, buy it before something new comes out. I got mine from loconut.com

I just got this phone from palm.com and have not stop using it since activation. First upgrade I did was add a 4gb sd card from Transcend because my old Treo 650 didn't even hack over 2gb of data. So for those who needed more memory for their Treo 650, look no more, the 700 can go beyond and more! That's not it tho. One of my favorite feature of the phone is streaming. This thing had my video ipod at hello! Because of Verizon's broadband, you can listen/watch music and video. Watch live TV. You can even record and DL music to your memory card. Voice reconigtion is another feature I love about this phone. You can say "play video" or "play audio" or "call Jill on cell phone". So far I have no problems with the phone and I had it for about a week. There's no doubt this might be the best pda phone out yet to date....until the motorola q comes out.

First, my install was simple, no sync problems. Activation was simple; and I was up and running in under an hour. What slowed me down was attempting to install Vindigo and Zagot for MS Mobile. They don't work yet, and I miss their utility. I had none of the problems as described in sync-ing and I am very impressed how easy the system downloaded the audible player and audible books to the SD card.

Second. This is not a Palm, in that the features are not as clear, but there are in the order of ten times more features programs and settings that can help you. In sum, it is to your advantage the way having a modern laptop of any OS is more helpful than a TRS 80. So having started with a Treo 180; a Treo 300; a 600 and a 650 now I have this 700w, there is no question in my mind that what you get is much more power: Zorch as Prof. Soloway likes to say. And it is a lot of Zorch. I walk around listening to an audio book -- not on Bluetooth due to some reason -- email comes in, I can respond. A phone call arrives, the audible player knows to stop; I take the call; finish; the audible player continues the book. The same works with music.

Finally and most importantly there is a five to ten times increase in download speed. This means everything if you Google some information during a conversation or if you need to look something up while you read Ted Koppel's comments in the NYT Select section. Having page loads occur in a snap, email come in fast, having your search results returned in the middle of the conversation rather than after everyone has gone onto the next topic -- leaving you still attempting to find the historical or scientific fact -- is simply worth a whole lot. Speed kills, in the metaphorical sense.

Can we complain about MS design, sure? Do we get to waste another half day to a day learning a new toy, sure. Is there some pain? Sure! But when we are working do we get this significantly increased Zorch for our personal use. Yes Sir! Praise goes to the techno Gods for this is a truly amazing personal computational device.


This phone has great features, however the deal killer for me is that ActiveSync synchronization does not work with the provided USB cable, and with IR and Bluetooth using a "safelisted" Belkin USB Bluetooth adapter.

I'm running Win XP SP2, and per the Device Manager yellow exclaimation point, Windows does not recognize the provided USB cable. Even after shutting down all firewalls, Palm support was unable to explain this problem too.

If Outlook contact and email synchronization is important to you, perform a Google search for "Treo 700w ActiveSync problems" and you will find lots of people having the problems I'm describing.

If you've found a solution to the ActiveSync problem, please write a review!

If you've bought the 700w and are having the same sync issues, you can contact Palm customer support at 1-866-697-7256, or Verizon by dialing 611 on your phone, perhaps they can help, however after spending 6 hours trying everything under the sun to get synchonization to work, even this serious tech guy and Palm tech support cannot get the sync issue resolved.

Also remember that Verizon has a 15 day return policy for new phones! Looks like I'll be returning mine...

I upgraded from the Treo 600 and let me tell you, this is a BIG upgrade. If you have the 650, it may or may not be worth it, but if you don't yet have one of these devices or have a 600, I would give it a strong recommendation.

Negatives:
1. I have installed the software on my laptop and desktop and have tried everything under the sun to successfully sync the device to no avail. There are NO customer service numbers, only internet help sessions. I have tried every single thing under the internet sessions and have still yet to successfully sync. I am currently frustrated beyond belief because I love the phone, but I can't sync all of my previous data to it. If any of you have any advice, please let me know!
2. It's the same size as the 600 and 650. It would have been nice to see a progression to a smaller device.
3. The Windows interface is different than the Palm and if you are a Palm OS lover, this device is not for you.

Postives-
1. I actually like the Windows interface slightly better.
2. The ability to sync Word and Excel is huge.
3. The almost broadband internet access is the real deal. It's not quite that fast, but pretty darn fast for checking web based email on the go or looking something up real quick.
4. The sound on of the person you are talking to is much better than the 600 and probably equivalent to the 650 from what I hear.
5. The camera is a nice 1.3 megapixel and takes decent pictures, but has no flash or zoom. The pictures are pretty good for a phone, however.
6. The TODAY screen is nice and the ability to have your speed dials with their picture on that screen is a nice touch.

Overall, this phone would get a 4/5 if I were able to get it to sync easily. The fact that I have probably spent 12 hours of effort is exhausting, disappointing and completely frustrating because I still have no solution in sight. If, however, you are able to get accomplish this task with ease, have a 600 or are looking at this vs. the 650, I would say go for it. The interface is user friendly, pleasant and refined. This phone will do it all for you...and then some.

I played with this phone for aorund 30 minutes in the Verizon store and I was deeply impressed!

I'll list my impressions in order below ---

1. EVDO --- believe the hype on EVDO!!! The first thing I did was open up Internet Explorer, and I navigated to some of the most difficult sites out there (friendster.com, etc) --- I was deeply impressed with how well the phone's browser handled all content, but even more impressed by how quick it downloaded! I would say the speed was definitely at a broadband speed

2. STARTUP SCREEN --- I'm coming off of using the Treo 600 and 650 --- one thing I love about both is that you can turn the phone on, click a letter on the keyboard, and go straight to the contact --- no problems here with WM - the phone quickly goes straight to your contact list upon touching a letter, and from there, its easy to place the call

3. TASK SCREEN --- in addition to the Startup Screen, the 700 has a much better task screen, showing you your new emails received, new calendar events, and any missed calls --- it looks a little cluttered at first, but getting use to it is easy

4. MS OFFICE --- MS Word and Excel both worked excellently on this phone, as I played around with both --- Powerpoint was also there, but I didn't have as much time to check that out, but it looked very stable

and of course, volume, etc was all very good

The 700 is an excellent upgrade, mostly because it provides you with VERY HIGH SPEED internet access, as well as more useful applications (Word, Excel) that truly start to turn this phone into a laptop replacement

I was hesitant at first, about WM on a Treo, but judging by what I'm seeing, I think this is the start of a great move for Palm

HASANDADDY LOVES YOU ALL!!!!!