Thoughts on the Treo 700p

Cy asked me what I thought about the Treo 700p. Coming from the perspective of a GSM Treo 650 user, using the phone on a network (T-Mobile USA) that doesn't officially offer or support it, but does offer excellent voice and data tariffs, here are some of my thoughts:

Note that I haven't played with one yet.

Frankly, I'm a bit jaded with Palm right now. Having used the Treo 650 for the last year, the platform is showing its age.

The OS crashes a lot. The web browser is, to put it mildly, inferior to many browsers from Nokia and you can't run a decent version of Opera on it either.

Hotsyncing contacts and calendars is still a joke (compared to what is available with Blackberries and Windows Mobile based devices when tied to Exchange Server.)

Here's where my Treo has gotten me at this point in my phone expectations:

• 1. Reception Everywhere
  
• 2. QWERTY keyboard.
  
• 3. Long Battery life with continuous background network connectivity.
  
• 4. Always on email. (ChatterEmail does this well.)
  
• 5. Syncing contacts and calendar with computer and beyond (eg Google Calendar), automatically, and over the air, in the background. (You can do this with Palm Desktop or The Missing Sync, but it is SLOW, and a blocking foreground process.)
  
• 6. Camera that works well in low light.
  
• 7. Ability to add mp3 ringtones (works with 3rd party add-on on Treo) and 3rd party software at will to and from my phone, and not through the phone company's wireless network.
  
• 8. For the love of god not crash more than once a day.
  
• 9. Touch Screen Phone Interface(once you start using it... It just works really well.)
  
• 10. Have enough space on the device to not HAVE to have expansion cards to store data.
  
• 11. Run on a user expandable Operating System (linux)
  
• 12. Pre-emptive Multitasking.
  
• 13. External audio silencer button.
  

The GSM Treo 650 handles #1, #2, #4, #6, #7 (without supporting mp3 ringtones... come on), #9and #13.
The CDMA Treo 700p improves on the 650 by adding #10. I bet it will still have problems with #5, #8, and they don't plan on moving to #11 or #12 before next year, and there's still no GSM Treo 700p, so forget #1, as it won't work abroad.

The Blackberry handles #1, #2, #3 (I hear), #4, #5, no mp3 support so no #7, #8, #10.

I still think the 700p will be better than any other phone out there, but only barely, Blackberry is catching up.

And if Apple does come out with a phone someday...