A brief rundown on what I think of my Treo 500v

The battery life is horrible. Admittedly I push mine very hard, I have the data connection on most of the day for push email (more on that later), and I like to read the news, and occasionally listen to music on it. I’d struggle to make it last much more than 24hrs, especially if I throw in a little Google Maps use.

There is almost no user-generated information about this phone online, which tells me: people who are likely to write about this stuff isn’t interested in this phone, or it’s not selling very well. Which is a shame, it’s actually a pretty good phone.

The microphone is very loud, and has excellent noise cancellation. I’ve been asked to speak softer by a few people on the other end of the line even in noisy places.

The keyboard is very good, I’d say as good as a Blackberry Curve. It is a tiny bit stiff, but the keys are well spaced and I can almost touch type on it. The only thing I didn’t like is the spacebar, there are two separate buttons on each end, and when you press it feels a bit inaccurate.

The “carousel” menu, which is only on the Vodafone version, is very good — if you’ve never used a smartphone before. It provides no customisation options, it’s hardwired to show only the programs that the phone ships with, so if you prefer Opera to Pocket IE, you have to navigate deeper into the menu structure into the basic Windows Mobile menus to find it. On the other hand, the menu is very clever, displaying favourite contacts, messages (email and sms/mms), recent programs, upcoming appointments and the like in a slick interface.

There are very few user customisable features at all, although this may be because this is the Standard edition of Windows Mobile. It is rather annoying that Microsoft ripped out all the bits that would be too hard to navigate without a touch screen, rather than spending a bit of time solving the UI problems.

(If you are comfortable with digging through the registry, I’ve found a few of the keys that can be edited to customise the phone. More in a later post.)

The UI itself suffers from all the general Windows Mobile problems, but the smartphone verison isn’t as fiddly as the touchscreen version, and can quite easily be used one-handed. One thing it does fall down hard on is you can’t quickly switch from one active program to another, the way that you can on a Symbian phone (which uses a special hardware key to do it). It’s pretty dumb, given that you can’t actually exit most applications from inside the application, you have to dig through a billion menus to find the Task Manager program to close applications. But, overall, it’s not too bad, and it’s snappy enough most of the time.

Push email and Activesync in general is awesome. This is my first exposure to Microsoft’s Exchange/Activesync/Outlook triangle, and I have to say that I am very impressed. I can definitely see why this is so popular for businesses, and why Apple licensed Activesync. That’s not to say that I haven’t had problems, though the problems seem to be network related rather than phone/server related. Combined with Mobipush, a free push email service, I now get push email straight from Gmail, with HTML, without having to pay Blackberry tax.

The camera, in good light, is exceptional — for a phone. In bad light? Forget it.

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