Palm Treo 800w Review

Camera:

The camera took acceptable pictures. Unless the lighting was perfect colors were a bit oversaturated and edges soft. The options are kept to a minimum: the camera can shoot in Burst, Timer or Normal mode, there are 7 brightness levels and the user can set the resolution from 160x120 to 1600x1200. The 2x digital zoom is pretty much worthless. Video options are even sparser, you can change the brightness and choose between 176x144 or 320x240 resolutions. You won’t be taking home videos with this, but in QVGA mode they’re fine for uploading to YouTube.

Palm Treo 800w sample video at 320x240 pixels resolution.

Multimedia:

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Windows Media Player 10 handles audio and video playback. The Sprint Music Store- found on the Touch and Mogul- is not on board this time around, a possible testament to the business focus of the 800w. SprintTV is preloaded, however, so the user isn’t totally shut out of entertainment options. It has the familiar SprintTV interface, as opposed to the different style found on the Instinct. Sprint may have optimized the service, or it could just be the 320x320 display, but picture quality was noticeably better than we’ve seen in the past.


Software:

The 800w runs on a Qualcomm MSM6800A 333Mhz processor and has 128MB RAM and 256MB ROM. For a Windows Mobile device it ran fairly smoothly and we only experienced occasional menu lag. It supports microSDHC expansion, but does not come bundled with any card unfortunately. Sprint is usually good about including accessories, but Palm devices continue to be an exception.

It is preloaded with standards such as Office Mobile and Windows Live, but there are also some useful programs that ship with the device, most notably Sprite Backup. It has two programs that take advantage of the built-in GPS: Sprint Navigation and Maps. Sprint Navigation is great as always, and Maps has a great homescreen plugin that allows the user to search for nearby businesses. Unfortunately the two do not work with each other as Live Search and Sprint Navigation do on the Instinct; if a user finds a business using Maps they will have to copy the address into Sprint Navigation. Unfortunately it has Picsel PDF Viewer instead of Adobe, but the user can always download the latter.


Of course there are countless third party programs the user can install to customize their device and make it more useful.  Despite its problems, Windows Mobile is an OS, and while not quite open-source, the development community really comes through in overcoming Microsoft's shortcomings.  Case in point: the 800w does ship with the capability of closing programs by hitting "x," the user has to end it via the task manager, but there are several third party task managers that will enable this feature.