This is one of the best reviews of the HandSpring’s new Treo 600 that I’ve seen. The author only got to spend about 6 hours alone with the device but managed to include a bunch of screen shots and gave some pretty detailed analysis. He was least impressed by the camera and most impressed by the improvement in the web browsing experience. He also points out that the browser has full CSS 2.0 and javascript support. Here’s the conclusion of the review:
I loved the Treo 600. I treasured every minute of the six hours I had it for, and I cannot wait to actually get my review unit. The Treo 600 has a great form factor, excellent buttons, a super bright screen (did I mention that the keys are also backlit? Light blue for the keyboard, dark blue for the app buttons), and speed. It is hard to put in words the responsiveness and the speed of the Treo 600. Switching apps is instant, rendering full 200 KB pages in blazer takes less than a second, and downloading them is done at what is about twice 56k speeds. The software is so well integrated in this device, it did not take long for me to pick it up and just figure things out. The speaker they chose makes beautiful sound (for a PDA), and the phone’s battery life is insane. I was unable to test the battery life, but I spent my 6 hours with the phone on one charge. Doug Carey said in his use that the Treo 600 has the second best battery life of any phone he’s ever used (the first going to the Sony Ericsson t68i). The Washington Post in their review of the Treo 600 claims to have gotten SEVEN hours of talk time off the GSM Treo 600.
From everything Handspring has done, it really appears that they listened to their users.
I can’t wait to get my hands on one (about 5 days to go). I’m really interested in seeing what it will take to blog from it. I guess I may finally have to look into making my blogs PDA friendly.
Update: Looks like they may be shipping already.
Movable Type is pretty PDA friendly already. On the Treo 300 the only real issue is left sidebars. Since the screen is so narrow the left sidebars become the top of the page, if they are long its a pain to reach the actual content. Easy to fix though, just put the code for the main content before the sidebar in the template, and use css to position the sidebar on the left. No idea if this is relevant to the new version of Blazer though.
Can’t wait to get my hands on the 600, looks like they fixed just about every issue I have with the 300…
Thanks Abe, that’s good to know.