Palm Treo 750

Palm Treo 750 has a compact design that the folks at Palm were really aggressive about. It stands short at 111mm x 59.3mm x 21.3mm, and weighs about 154g. For practical purposes, however, the phone is pretty bulky. You are going to have to get used to that bulge in your pocket.

The phone features a QWERTY keypad, which surprisingly doesn't take up a lot of space. Even though the keys are closely bunched together, the surface is well rounded, so you don't end up hitting the wrong keys. If you like to keep long nails, however, you may need to reconsider your fashion sense!

Just above the keypad you will find the start button, call and cancel keys, the five-way navigation pad and the open keys. The touchscreen displays only up to 65k (16-bit color) at a resolution of 240 x 240.

If there's one thing I appreciate about this phone, it's got to be the fact that you don't really need to use the touch feature all the time; least of all when you are messaging or taking notes. All the functions can be accessed from the keypad alone.

This Treo is equipped with a 300MHz Intel processor with 128MB flash memory, which makes the phone kind of sluggish for all that it has to offer.

Sadly, the kind of effort and strain it takes to run all those applications is too much for the existing processor to handle. To add to that, simple things like unlocking the phone seems to take an eternity, which is quite unacceptable.

Such niggles apart, the Treo 750 is feature-rich, and can be the perfect device to integrate your office needs. It offers dial by name and photo speed dialing directly from 'Today' (which is like the desktop on your computer) screen.

One thing about the dial by name feature is that you can choose to search by name or enter the number directly on the Today screen. Since the letters and numbers share numpad space, every time you type a letter, the corresponding number will be entered too. If you press another number it will let you keep typing numbers, and if you go beyond the numpad you can start typing a name. Cool or what?

Another unique feature of the phone is that whenever you get a call and you wish to ignore it, you have the option to ignore it with a text message. This is a polite way of ignoring the caller — you can simply choose from presets such as "busy in a meeting".

The phone also offers an easy one-touch voicemail management system, by means of which you can set up a speed dial that will allow you to access any compatible voicemail box. In the settings, you can define username and password so you don't have to go through the hassle every time you access your voicemail.

Messaging is fun. Instead of listing messages sequentially in the inbox, the phone sorts them according to the person you're interacting with, in what the company calls 'chat-style' view.

For incoming calls, ringtones have been further segregated to known caller, unknown caller, when on roaming etc.

The Treo 750 comes with an application that allows you to use a foldable Bluetooth keyboard that makes taking notes, replying to mails, writing letters, etc. much easier. It cannot, however, be paired with other phones.

The usual assortment of features have been thrown in — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, even a Picsel PDF viewer. The media aspect uses Windows Media Player for music and is just average. Windows Mobile phones have always been very bad music players. Camera is below par. It's a 1.3MP camera that churns out over-exposed pictures with maximum noise.

The Microsoft Direct Push technology enables you to receive office email, calendar, contacts etc through Exchange Server 2003. The device also supports Xpress Mail and POP/IMAP options.

The battery life is another thing that I think is brilliant. You don't have to worry that your smartphone will conk off before the end of the day.