The Treo 650 (Continued)

The memory expansion slot supports industry-standard SD memory cards and input/output capabilities so you can view pictures on your friend’s digital camera’s SD memory card. Memory expansion lets you to add e-books, pictures, music and videos to your Treo 650 experience.

And speaking of memory, you never need to worry about losing data on your Treo 650, which runs on a non-volatile file system (NVFS). You can change batteries without worrying, and need not bite your nails, even mentally, when your battery goes flat.

One feature that is quite standard these days is the infrared port. With your Treo 650, you can beam your business card to a client or play computer games against a friend, or even listen to that infectious song that’s been playing in your head through Real Player™.

Playing through Real Player™

Bluetooth™ is currently one the most sought-after features in a device. Aside from allowing you to use the Bluetooth headset that is the trend nowadays, the Treo 650 is also able to synchronise with your Bluetooth-enabled PC, Mac or printer wirelessly.

Software

As far as functionality goes, the 650 does it all, from e-mail to web browsing to organizer to messaging functions to MP3 player. Viewing native files, like HTML, MS Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets, is a breeze and, if you need to, you can even do some editing on the fly.

Support for corporate email access to Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 using palmOne’s Versamail email software will allow you to get that urgent reply from your staff, should you need to.

Checking emails with the Treo 650

One of the features that I truly like about the 650 is that you get to access the Internet in full format with frames as like on a PC. It also has the common buttons like Back/Forward, History and even Bookmarks for the sites you love. And if you love the site that much, you can, of course, save the content to be viewed offline on your memory expansion card.

A new feature of the Treo 650 is the ability for users to view both picture messages and text messages in a single screen. This lets you read both types of messages in chronological order in a chat-style view, as if reading a single conversation.

A chat-like screen that shows both picture and text messages

Spurred by the open OS concept, Palm devices have traditionally been among the best supported, with more than 20 000 programs developed. With a little tweaking, most can be used with the Treo 650.

Last, but by no means least, the Treo 650, like most Palm-based devices, is one of the very few handheld devices that seems able to seamlessly work with Apple Mac machines, which more or less corners the market of die-hard Mac fanatics.