PalmOne Treo 650

DESIGN:
The 650 looks a lot like its predecessor, until you turn on the display, which is brighter and crisper. The keyboard has been tweaked slightly but remains one of the best smart phone QWERTYs out there. Under the hood, the processor is twice as fast as the 600's, the 23MB of memory is nonvolatile, and the battery is now removable. The Treo 650 really stands out from the crowd because of its five-way navigation button, which makes one-handed navigation incredibly simple. Other smart phones feel downright clunky.

FEATURES:
Bluetooth is included for tasks such as syncing headsets, but Verizon Wireless disabled the feature that lets the 650 connect to a laptop to act as a modem. The camera maxes out at 640 x 480 pixels for photos and 352 x 288 pixels for video.

EMAIL:
Verizon Wireless' Wireless Sync service was a headache to configure, due to gremlins such as outdated instructions. Once it's running, however, it's handy for pushing e-mail from your enterprise server or ISP account to the 650. The e-mail junkie in us wished that new messages could be pushed out immediately rather than the most frequent setting of every 20 minutes. Verizon Wireless bundles the 650 with several useful applications. The standout is DataViz' Documents To Go 7 which displays and edits Excel, PowerPoint, and Word docs. 

PERFORMANCE:
Sound quality and network coverage were excellent in our tests. For a CDMA phone, the 650 has a very good talk time of over five hours, and you should expect at least a few days of endurance with intermediate data usage. This Treo 650 runs on Verizon Wireless' 1X network rather than its newer, faster EV-service, so speeds average 65 Kbps. That's plenty fast enough for downloading Web pages, thanks to the very efficient Web browser, which loads Web pages almost immediately.

VERDICT:
Competing smart phones have higher-speed data connections, like EV-DO and Wi-Fi, but the PalmOne Treo 650 proves that ease of use is more important than faster data rates any day. It's an exceptional PDA and phone, Web browser, and e-mail device all in one. The only blemishes are the expensive monthly data plan ($44.99 compared to just $15 for Sprint PCS' Treo 650) and limited Bluetooth functionality.