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Photograph courtesy of Sprint PCS
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By WILSON ROTHMAN
Palm-phone fans have been eagerly awaiting Handspring's updated Treo for some time. While the new 600 isn't much smaller than the original 300 (and actually weighs half an ounce more), it's a major improvement.
On the exterior, a new built-in VGA camera, brighter screen and SD/MMC memory card slot mark the product's evolution; inside, it runs the Palm 5.2 OS, has twice the onboard memory and sports a processor that's more than four times faster than its predecessor's. According to Handspring, there's an extra hour of talk-time battery life, bringing the duration up to four hours, with a whopping 240 hours of standby.
All of this technological overhaul didn't skimp on functionality: the Treo 600 is fairly elegant in operation. My favorite feature on the Sprint PCS edition is the Blazer browser, which surfs both WAP and HTML pages and will display pages in two modes: "optimized," which wraps text to fit the screen but jumbles graphics, and "wide page," which puts page elements more or less where they belong, though you have to scroll to see it all.
A few things do bother me about the new Treo. Other camera phones have a hot button that takes you straight to that feature; the Treo doesn't. The Handspring folks remind me that all you have to do is press the Phone button then the right arrow — a simple solution, yes, but far from cool. The keys themselves are quite small, and that can slow you down; I found I could type more on Sony's similarly laid out Clié NX80 in the same amount of time. Maybe practice will change that.
Although the Treo 600 will be available through a number of carriers, Sprint PCS will be first to roll it out, sometime in mid October. On top of its popular Palm app store, powered by Handango, the carrier will soon introduce Palm app downloads through the PCS Vision service. Instead of entering a credit card number, you just pick your app and download. But go easy, Palm junkies: charges do appear in your monthly bill.
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