The Little Phone that Roared!

Anybody that lives by their PDA cellphone, knows how much a well-designed phone can impact your life and everyday experiences. I have had several generations of Windows mobile phones generations after several generations of Palm OS phones on the Sprint network and can write volumes about each. However, when I first used this little Palm phone, I was rendered speechless.

First of all, it is small and lightweight. For a big man, this would might be a liability, but actually it is so well-designed and buttons laid out in easy to reach place. In fact, I prefer it over my wife's new HTC Touch Pro, because I can do everything with it that it was designed to do with one hand. But this phone is no shrinking violet either, and has a VERY loud external speaker, earphone, and very good polyphonic ringtones to match. I used to always feel like I was going prematurely deaf with my old PPC-6700 Window Mobile 5 phone, which sounded weak and tinny. In fact, I can play a YouTube video on the installed Kinoma player through the built-in speaker, like it was a radio with clear and bright sound. The Sprint network is excellent for buffering content and keeping the video streams from staggering too much. Naturally, in urban areas like Boston, and New York City, throughput is quite good.

The Palm OS (by Access) is a mature Palm 5 implementation complete with all of the  integrated features you'd expect from a PDA phone, calendar, Email, contacts list integration with the phone features, messaging integrated with the contacts list. Perhaps the only disappointment was with the default Blazer browser, which has improved over the years for compatibility with most HTML web pages, but underwhelming as a web access substitute. For example, wiki pages, such as wikipedia, render as a single column of letters, making those sites pretty much unreadable. Luckily, many of the top web sites have developed Palm apps over the years (facebook and Google Maps are the most notable), so with a little effort, you can trick out your phone with these apps. My experience with Google Maps is decent for a non-GPS phone and the triangulation routines to find your location are consistently wrong and always place my true location at the outer limits of its accuracy, but in most urban locations this may not be as much a limitation. Directions from Google Maps applications still deliver the goods with this free downloaded app and are easy to use with one hand.

One very big pleasant surprise is the camera and camcorder app, which seems to produce very sharp, colorful, and pleasing pictures. Oddly enough, I find this to be very useful when my digital camera is far out of reach. The Pics and Videos application could be better to manage images, however, as there is no cropping of pictures or in camera trimming of video. The ample Built-in Memory and SDHC compatibility are now well integrated features, so there are not those funky image management issues you had with earlier Palm OS implementations.

The construction of the phone is just OK, and the plastic back feels flimsy. Fortunately, I rarely have to take off the battery cover, so the plastic does not have an opportunity to flex or break.

Overall, I would recommend this phone highly for those looking for an excellent handset with bluetooth and other PDA integrated functions.