Palm's new Treo 700p may look like older Treos, but it is loaded with internal improvements that Treo fans have been waiting for. The 700p, available in two versions,adds high-speed EV-DO networking, a better camera, and updated software to our Editors' Choice Palm Treo 650. That's enough to keep Palm in the lead for the best-balanced, easiest-to-use smartphone in the USA.
The Treo 700p looks just like its Windows Mobile cousin, the Treo 700w, which in turn looks almost exactly like the familiar and much-loved Treo 650. The main difference between the 650 and the 700p is the keyboard. The 700p's keys are squarer, making them a hair more susceptible to mistyping. The five-way rocker above the keyboard is bigger, and the activity keys near the rocker have been juggled around a bit; the Menu button has been moved down to replace the right Shift key, and the power/hang-up button and phone pick-up button are now at the top of the button stack. The 700p's sharp, 320-by-320 color screen is identical to the 650's (and much higher-res than the 700w's). At 4.4 by 2.3 by 0.9 inches and 6.4 ounces, all three phones could easily be mistaken for each other.

The advances in the Treo 700p are in software. It takes the 700w's advantages—fast EV-DO networking and a 1.3-megapixel camera—and marries them to the latest in easy-to-use Palm OS software. Yes, the Palm OS is getting old; most notably, it doesn't support multitasking, which is annoying when you're downloading e-mail and want to do something else. But it's still tremendously responsive and requires relatively few keypresses or stylus taps to do what you want.

The 700p is also the first smartphone to access Sprint TV streaming video service. The live TV channels look blocky on the 700p's high-res screen; they're transmitted in 176-by-132, and the 700p is 320-by-320. But they stream, and they work. Handmark's On Demand information service also comes with the Treo, delivering maps, weather, movie times, and news headlines.

Because DocumentsToGo is burned into ROM, the 700p has 60MB of memory available. That's not much in the Microsoft Windows world, but it's plenty for smaller Palm apps. You can add an SD card for more storage. The 700p supports the FAT32 file system, so it should work with current SD cards up to 4GB, but not with next-generation SD cards that use the SDHC standrad.
Although the Treo syncs easily with both Macs (with iSync or Palm Desktop) and PCs (with Palm Desktop or Microsoft Outlook), Mac users don't get the ultimate prize—the ability to use the Treo as a USB modem on Sprint's EV-DO network. With it hooked up to a PC using Sprint's Connection Manager, I got excellent speeds of 900 to 1,100 Kbps. That's awesome. But when I connected to a Mac using Bluetooth, speeds slowed down to about 200 to 300 Kbps. The problem is the Treo's Bluetooth 1.2 stack, which is just too slow to handle the full speed of EV-DO.

You won't get that full speed in Palm's Blazer browser, either. Blazer's not-so-fast rendering engine kept effective speeds on bandwidth-test Web sites down to about 200 Kbps. But the device as a whole feels very responsive, and it's fast enough to play music or stream video. (Streaming media appears in a customized version of Kinoma's media player, which can handle MP3 , WMA , WMV , and MPEG4 streams.) In both processor and video benchmarking tests, the 700p came out slightly faster than both the Treo 650 and the Palm TX, the Editors' Choice standalone PDA.

The 700p has plenty of messaging options. The simple VersaMail POP3 /IMAP mail client now syncs e-mail and contacts with Microsoft Exchange 2003 servers, remembers recently used addresses, and hooks into DocumentsToGo for attachment reading. There are also hooks on board for Good's GoodLink corporate e-mail system and Sprint's own Business Connection push e-mail. The separate SMS / MMS app now has a threaded, conversation-based view, where messages from the same address are grouped together.

Also on board are a file manager, the popular Bejeweled game, and a basic version of the Pocket Tunes MP3 player, which you can upgrade for $24.95 to support WMA files, music purchased from Microsoft-compatible stores, and streaming radio stations. Palm also includes the Avvenu remote-file-access service (check PCMag.com soon for our review of Avvenu).

As a phone, the Treo 700p is fine but not great. Sound through the earpiece in a noisy location was a little wobbly, and transmissions were clear but a bit tinny. There's no in-ear voice feedback or noise cancellation. The Treo paired well with my Plantronics Bluetooth headset (though I've heard Treos have some trouble with Motorola headsets), and the speakerphone is loud and powerful. Battery life is its one standout strength: The beefy battery gives it 5 hours 16 minutes of talk time. That's especially impressive considering that the screen no longer completely turns off when you're in a call. A new "ignore with text" feature lets you send a quick SMS to someone calling you if, for example, you're in a meeting. And that the phone vibrates when you hit its mute switch is a nice touch.