Treo 500V - A Review

The new Palm 500V is the latest in the Treo lineup from Palmone. When fans of the Treo asks for a new Treo design, this is not what they meant. Obviously, Palmone is not listening intently. Design is not ground breaking, and the screen looks too small for a truely innovative PDA phone.

That being said, let's take a deeper look at the phone. It runs on WM6, which may be a time for celebration for many. It opens up the oppoetunity for users to run the many WM enabled applications, and even local GPS software such as MapKing that used to be out of reach for Palm users. This is especially true for Asia, although in the USA and Europe, you have a wider range of options as far as GPS softwares go.

Glancing at the face of the 500V, you will notice that the querty keypad is a carry over from the 700 Treo series, which isn't a bad thing. Size of the keys itself is exactly the same as the 750V, and takes some getting used to if you are a new user to Treos.While a lot of other PDA phones are adopting the minimalist design without a full keypad, it sure is good news for the rest of us who like the ease and speed of typing with a full querty keypad.

The 500V is smaller in size than the 750V, it has grown more compact. In fact, it is the thinnest Treo to date measuring 110 x 61.5 x 16.5 mm. Being a Palm, the ease of use of the WM6 system is there, it gives it a customized look compared to other WM6 phones. One hated feature that this phone left out is threaded messenging. It gives your sms a threaded chat feel to it. Why on eath will Palm leave such a trademark feature out?

The 500V is a 3G phone, but leaves out HSDPA and no wifi as well. While we see other pda phones come with more features by the day, Palm always leaves something out that keeps the Treo user a little disappointed. It will be great to see wifi and HSDPA in a new phone like this. Internal memory is 256MB with a microSD expansion slot. It should really include 1GB of standard memory by the rate new phones are today. It has a 2MP camera, but with no flash and no autofocus. There isn't a front camera on this phone as well.

As usual, this Treo is a disappointment in terms of its feature set. Users' expectations of today's hot features have been ommitted. Unless you are a die hard Treo user, you may want to give this one a miss.