palmOne Treo 600

It's a measure of the palmOne Treo 600's excellence that this year-old handheld is still a top option for people looking for an equal balance of phone and PDA functions. It's also available on a wider variety of carriers than any other smart phone in our roundup.

At 5.8 ounces, the Treo looks and feels more like a PDA than a phone. Yet, it's easier to hold and fit into your pocket than the BlackBerry 7780 or T-Mobile Sidekick II. The thumb-style QWERTY keyboard is small, but the domed keys make typing surprisingly easy.

The Treo's greatest strength is Palm OS 5.2.1, with its thousands of available applications. Various browser and e-mail options are available, including Good Technology's GoodLink, a BlackBerry-like enterprise solution that wirelessly connects and syncs your Treo to Microsoft Outlook, and Inbox To Go, an Outlook-compatible solution that polls your Outlook in-box as often as you like.

The Treo's Secure Digital memory slot supports SD I/O, but the slot's power is too low for Bluetooth or Wi-Fi cards. Fortunately, the unit comes with a USB cradle for transferring files.

The Treo's low-res (160-by-160) screen is starting to look old, and we'd love to see palmOne integrate Bluetooth or Wi-Fi and add a higher-res camera than the current VGA. (Get a glimpse of the new Treo, rumored to be coming out this fall, in our sidebar "Pssst! The Smart-Phone Scoop," page 100.) That said, the palmOne Treo 600 is still a very good smart phone if you like Palm OS and don't mind a bulkier form factor.

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