Communication by Palm One Treo 700w Communicator

Palm One has introduced latest design cell phone Palm One Treo 700w. It is a loudmouth. Alarms, ringtones and general audio out through the large rear-firing speaker will get your attention. The speaker is located on the back so you're not accidentally deafened when an alarm goes off while you're holding the phone to your head in conversation. The speakerphone is very loud and clear as well. The phone supports MIDI, MP3, WMA and WAV ringtones (just drag new ones into the Rings folder inside the Windows folder on the Treo). Like all Windows Mobile phones, the Treo can play MP3s using the included Windows Media Player 10 Mobile, even DRM protected Play For Sure content.

Windows Media Player also handles WMA, ASF and WMV videos for movie playback. If you want to watch AVI, DIVX and various other MPEG formats or listen to OGG music, download The Core Pocket Media Player (TCPMP), an excellent free open source player which works fine on the Treo. We use TCPMP to run our video playback benchmark test, and threw our usual test file at it: "The Chosen" (a neat BMW flick with Clive Owen) which is a 4:26 minute long, 10 meg MPEG1 file recorded at 320 x 240, 308 kb/s. The results aren't stunning for a file encoded at a fairly low bitrate but it manages just fine with videos under 550 kbps. The 700w runs on a 312 MHz Intel XScale processor with ~25 megs of available RAM to run programs and 128 megs of flash ROM where the OS lives and where you can install programs and data.

There are 62 megs of storage memory free on the Treo 700w, which is a generous helping of space. Since it's a Windows Mobile 5.0 device it features persistent storage which means your data will survive a complete battery drain. The Palm One Treo 700w uses Microsoft's no-frills Bluetooth stack which lacks Wizards or any other user-friendly way of walking you through the connection process. Though spartan, it gets the job done and you can use it to pair with any supported device (since there's no wizard listing devices you might connect to, guessing at supported devices and Bluetooth profiles is par for the course). The Treo supports headset, handsfree, serial port (used for GPS) and HID (keyboards and mice) profiles. We tested the Treo with Think Outside's Wireless Bluetooth Keyboard using only the built-in drivers from the OS and it worked fine.

The camera can take photos up to 1280 x 1024 resolution and supports lower resolutions such as QVGA and 160 x 140. The application offers 7 brightness settings (normal and up to + or - 3 EV) along with 2x digital zoom. You may save images to internal memory or an SD card in one of three quality settings and set the image prefix as you wish. The Treo 700w can shoot video with audio (you can turn off audio if you like) and you can set a 15 second, 30 second or no limit on duration. The phone saves videos in .3g2 format in 176 x 144 or 352 x 288 resolution and also offers 7 brightness recording levels. Like still shots, video is lacking in color, and is of average quality compared to other US camera phones with less jerkiness than most. Audio is recorded at 8kHz and our samples reported video at 26 fps. You can view videos on the Treo 700w using the included Windows Media Player and on the desktop using QuickTime or other applications. Please purchase online www.phoneandbeyond.com