Palm - and Treo lovers - are hoping the 750v is the holy grail of smartphones. UMTS 3G, push-email support, a 1.3-megapixel camera... this Treo ticks all the boxes, but will it leave us wanting?

As time went on, little hardware details stood out.  The dedicated silent-mode switch on top is a pleasure, saving both the need to unlock the device as well as those “does the whole OS know to be quiet?” paranoias.  The navigation keys, particularly the slender action buttons, are tactile and perfectly weighted, and after the initial brain-twist required by WM5’s window minimizing/closing behaviour the well placed “ok” button becomes second nature for whizzing round apps. 

I’m still changeable in my opinion of the keyboard.  Don’t get me wrong, the next handset I buy myself will definitely sport the full QWERTY, but whether those keys will be Palm’s I’m not yet decided.  Obviously they’re small and relatively close together, and obviously due to limited space a function key for entering numbers and symbols is necessary; my gripe is not the need for compromise but a personal one about the way it has been handled.  So, speaking personally, I found that the hard keys became uncomfortable to type on for anything longer than a quick email reply, and that my speed was capped by the perhaps inevitable habit of hitting more than one letter at a time (or, as often happened, the ‘Alt’ key when going for the space-bar).  For a UK handset I’d have liked to see a £-sign instead of $-sign, which is obviously of little concern to anyone in North America, and perhaps the brightness hotkey (which I set once and forgot about) could’ve instead held a colon.

As you can tell, though, these are nit-picks and your own experience will likely vary.  The ability to immediately respond to emails and quickly compose SMS messages easily outweighed any real displeasure, and if by virtue of thumb-board-phobia my replies were shorter than normal then that was probably to the pleasure of my correspondents!  If anything, it shows that you should audition each keyboard as much as possible before deciding on a handset, testing not just for initial feel on the dummy models but also demanding a working example to check accuracy too.

Push email was a cinch to set up, dropping the details from the SlashGear hosted Exchange server into the straightforward ActiveSync wizard and giving it a few minutes to synchronise.  After that, emails sent to my address appeared within a few seconds on the Treo, and I grew to expectantly keep one ear cocked for the gentle beep.  Let nobody tell you anything different: push email is addictive.  Messages which normally you’d mark as read and forget are instead devoured hungrily and responded to, if only to show that you’ve done so scant minutes after it left their own fingers.  Still, as mail increased it gave me the opportunity to critique the Treo’s handling of them.  With one new message the notification pop-up shows the sender and subject line, giving you the option of viewing or dismissing it, but with more than one unread email you’re only shown the number waiting to be dealt with.  I would’ve liked to have seen a list of senders, at least, to decide at-a-glance whether I should drop everything and read.  This is, I assume, a part of the Windows OS, but given the tweaks Palm has taken it upon itself to do elsewhere it would be nice to see this changed also. 

Web browsing was a mixture of pleasure and frustration, and thankfully Palm was responsible for the former.  UMTS 3G data proved speedy and responsive; sadly Internet Explorer Mobile is not an enjoyable place to experience it.  The page rendering and navigation options, so important for browsing on a small screen, lack the finesse of, say, NetFront’s Smart-Fit layout or Nokia’s own cellphone browser with its clever full-page thumbnail overlay during scrolling.  Blogging-on-the-go was made tricky with the absence of tabbed browsing and the tendency of IE Mobile to squash the text entry boxes into slits too narrow even to fit a whole word.  I had thought that the 750v might allow me to more quickly get news tips up onto SlashGear, but after a few frustrating attempts I gave up.  Anything demanding more consideration of content and layout than mere text will prove to be a chore.  The payoff for that full keyboard and relatively compact footprint is a small screen; even when toolbars are hidden, the 240 x 240 display demands a whole lot of scrolling.  I’d love to see a high-resolution LCD used, which would fit more content albeit at the price of occasional squinting.