Great Business Tool!

I travel a lot about 50,000 flown miles per year, and I'm away from my desk about 2 days a week, at least. I needed to have a tool that was portable, and definitely one that was in-sync with my office. I also wanted to have an integrated mobile phone so I would not have to carry two devices.

I narrowed it down to two options. The Blackberry 7100 series from RIM, or the Treo 650 from PalmOne. I have had several older none networked Palm Pilots in the past, and was familiar with the Operating System and new it's value.

What tipped the scales for me was the Treo 650's improvements to email. I was told, although am not familiar with the short comings of the Treo 600. Once I knew I would be able to get emails live and in Sync with my office (like the Blackberry) I was sold on the Palm. Why? First of all the Palm OS has been around for more nearly 10 years, and there are literally 100's of thousands of programs that can be purchased and downloaded for this device. If the Palm doesn't offer what you want out of the box, there's a good chance that someone has writing a program to do what you want. So Treo was the clear choice for me.

The Treo 650 itself is a very slim device, with some great features. It phone can be used with the touch-screen so you don't have to press the small number buttons to place a call. It also is Blue-Tooth enabled which allows the uses of several wireless headsets and speaker phones. BlueTooth is currently the standard for wireless technology, and depending on the device you buy, you will get clear sound from the bluetooth headset, and it will work with the Treo in my briefcase, glovebox, or any other place your Treo might be when your not holding it.

E-Mail accounts are fairly easy to set up, if you're using a simple POP3 account (most home emails for example) simply follow the prompts and answer the questions, like account name, password, POP Server and SMTP server (both easily obtained by calling your ISP, or looking on Outlook settings).

Web Access is great, not terribly fast but not bad, but it is full web pages, photos, logos, links, just like you would see on a regular browser, not the text optimized web pages your used to seeing on mobile phones. You can also use Instant Messengers, like Yahoo!, AOL IM etc.

Easy of use: Like I said it's a pretty handy tool, but it's not a replacement for a laptop, it's just a means of getting by until you can get to the office. I say that because the keyboard is a bit small and you'll find yourself being a bit more brief than usual, but still not bad, now I keep in touch while traveling. Doing email at the airport gate, or even while on the plane, you can turn the phone off, do all your email, and then reconnect when you land to send them all off.

Treo-650 also supports product like GOODLINK which allow most corporate email systems to sync immediately with your Treo. My company uses Goodlink and if I have both the laptop and the Treo going they are only seconds away from being totally synced.

There are other features which are nice too. The Treo has a speaker phone built in, it has good quality camera, and video camera, which can come in hand in a pinch, it also has an expansion card (now upto 1GB) that you can store data, apps, and even MP3's. The Treo has a real player installed and can play your favorite music.

Now some of the drawbacks: I think the keyboard is a bit small, but you do get used to it. Also you can't us the MP3 on your card for the ringers, this may be because my wireless provider disabled this feature so I'd have to buy ringers from them, but I'm not sure. There is a work-around a program called Ringo, but I had some difficulties with it. My only other complaint was that it was quite expensive. I paid $425 after rebate. Also for that price I think it should include a nice carrying case, but it does not.

All in all I'm very happy with this product and would strongly recommend it to anyone looking to be very connected.