Palm Treo 680 review

Palm Treo 680 Review

Reviewed by: Sandra Vogel

Reviewed on: 9 January 2007

There's 64MB of user memory built in and you can easily add to this with SD cards -- the slot is very accessible on the right edge of the casing and is protected by a large cover. Out of curiosity we tried one of SanDisk's new 4GB SDHC cards in the Treo 680 and the device recognised it. Not all devices recognise the format, and the Treo 680 specifications don't indicate that it does, so that's pleasing.

There's a camera built in, with its lens on the back of the casing. Sadly it's stuck in VGA-land, and it doesn't take shots we'd be proud to share any other way than via MMS.

There's an MP3 player included, but rather stupidly Palm has decided to bundle a mono earbud with a 2.5mm connector. When we used our own favourite headphones and a 2.5mm to 3.5mm adaptor we could only get mono output to them, though Palm says the Treo 680 outputs stereo to headphones.

Unfortunately Wi-Fi is not included here -- Bluetooth and infrared are, though.

For all its lack of features at the cutting edge of smart phone capability, the Treo 680 is hard to dismiss -- it's crammed with software and designed with ease of use very much in mind. The threaded SMS, for example, lets you view text messages between you and another person as a chat thread so you can keep an eye on the flow of an exchange. Also handy is the copy of Documents To Go, which lets you create and edit Microsoft Word and Excel files, and the copy of VersaMail, which can collect email from multiple accounts.

When it comes to humble voice calls, the phone dialler caters for really easy touchscreen access to an on-screen dial pad, favourite numbers, call log and even shortcuts to applications.

We'd be lying if we said the Treo 680 was a huge advance on the Treo 650, but if you haven't had a Treo before what is on offer here is solidly good stuff.

Performance
Because of the quick access to contacts and speed dials it's really easy to make voice calls. The loud speaker is fine and call quality generally did not let us down.

We're a bit concerned about battery life, though. We asked the Treo 680 to play MP3s from an SD card continuously looping our tunes and keeping its screen on. We got 3 hours 45 minutes of music, which frankly isn't much cop for a smart phone.

Thanks to Expansys for providing a review sample of this phone.

Edited by Mary Lojkine
Additional editing by Kate Macefield