Review of Treo 680

Treo 680

Great smartphone - good form factor and comfortable to use. It is stable, a good email machine and comes with Docs2Go which copes with most attachment formats.

Pureplay readers will know that I have been indecisive for a while on the subject of a mobile device. 2 weeks ago I finally made a decision - rather than go with some of the newer smart phones on the market I decided to buy a Palm Treo.

Contributing to that:

• My contacts and calendar were currently on a Palm TX and I wanted to stay with that format if possible.
• I have a couple of months coming up where I will be working away from my desk very regularly and I was starting to find that emails arriving while I was away from my desk needed my attention.
• I want stable - I have had a number of mobile devices/phones in the past and I did not want something that rebooted in the middle of a call.
• No requirement for RSS feeds or other complex data consumption on the road - just email.

Watch the sequence that prompted my purchase:

• Received a special offer email from Palm for 680 and integrated GPS system.
• Followed the link to the Palm site where I had to start figuring out where the offer was. Ran out of patience for that.
• Remembered the Luzerntech site - a Dublin business who use ebay as their primary channel for disposing of redundant/returned stock - including Palm. http://stores.ebay.co.uk/LuzernTech

Went there and bid on a 680 (cost me stg176)

I am loving it. No wifi, lousy camera and not great battery life are the downsides (this is a new replacement battery that I purchased yesterday - http://www.seidioonline.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=773)

Upside is stability (as already mentioned) really neat size and styling (better than it looks on their site) and a keyboard that gets easy to use really quickly.

I am enjoying this and will hopefully have it as my single mobile device for a year or two :-)

One thing to watch out for - it appears that O2 are the only network to support email on this. I left Meteor last week because they did not and Vodaphone tech support were helpful but unable to say for sure that I could switch to them and use the email.

O2 seemed certain but to be sure I called to an O2 business centre and they checked it for me. Done and they now have us (myself and my wife) as 2 new customers spending nearly €100 per month between us including my signing up to the Blackberry data extra of €20 a month which also accommodates email on my Palm.

keith 

 

Rated 4/5 on Aug 14 2007 by Keith Bohanna

LouderVoice Review Tags: 680, ebay, email, luzerntech, meteor, mobile device, o2, palm, palm 680, smartphone, treo, vodaphone

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Comments

[Conor O'Neill]

Sounds excellent. I'm still getting to grips with N770. Works well over bluetooth to N70 so I have touch screen, wifi, 3g and a camera. But two devices :-(