Before we even get started on this one I’m going to have a couple things to apologize for. The first being I’m VERY sorry that I ultimately failed on doing the diary portion of this review. I would like to say that it was a fault of anything other than myself, but frankly I just didn’t end up doing it because most days I would not have had anything good to say. More on this in a bit, but reality is I didn’t last a week with the Treo Pro before I ended up having to put it down for a few days because I was so frustrated at WinMo. NOT the Treo Pro – WinMo.

Second thing I’m going to apologize for is the amount of negativity you’re likely to see in the coming portions of this. I’m calling this a Semi-Review because I’m not going to be very complete, my facts are not going to be checked completely, I didn’t check every function of the Treo Pro, I didn’t do 70% of the stuff I normally do when I’m reviewing something, and again this was not a fault of the Treo Pro. It was WinMo.

So, anyway if you feel like having a good laugh at my misery… click on through. I promise this one was not easy to write.

Packaging

Look – Palm nailed this one. Gone was the default orange AT&T Box I’m used to seeing. The packaging for the Treo felt very Apple-ish. There was a spot for everything, no wasted space, nicely designed and well it just didn’t seem like something from Palm!

Included in the packaging was the power supply, a good length USB sync cable, throw away headphones and some documentation. Palm did a nice job here with the documentation … for the first time in years I actually ended up using the quick reference guide to figure out a few things and everything I went looking for (like email setup, power shutoff etc) was all well covered.

Hardware

The Treo Pro ended up in my hands for one reason only – it looked incredible and I wanted to try it out simply because of that. But looks alone are not what make a device, and the Treo Pro didn’t disappoint here either. For once Palm got smart and made sure to include everything you would need. 3G speed is here, GPS is here and Wifi is here. The Pro really is for all intents a feature rich device. Sure you don’t have VGA but most devices don’t, sure you don’t have touch flow (which from what I’ve gathered so far is not a productivity enhancer anyway), and sure you don’t have whatever new tech the latest and greatest device has – but you have the basic requirements from a feature rich device including expandable storage (MicroSD).

Ok – first issue… why oh why can’t we just get a good old standard mini-USB connector on the bottom? Granted the standard headphone jack was a nice discovery, but I’ve got mini-USB cables all over the place. I really don’t want to have to add another type to my collection, which I would definitely end up doing since I always carry a charge/sync cable with me and have one at home as well. Heck I have an iPhone cable in the car, one at work and one at home just in case. I don’t need more types of cables.

Everyone who makes phones and isn’t Palm or Apple – Listen up: PUT A RINGER SWITCH ON THE DEVICE. That is all. I loved Palm for doing this on their devices and I’m glad they kept with the tradition. My iPhone silent switch is constantly being used depending on where I am and the Treo Pro switch was definitely used a lot as well!

Here’s something else I loved – see those buttons? Betcha had to check and see if there were buttons didn’t you! Palm did an excellent job with not only button placement, but button placement in relation to how far they stuck out from the device. All of the buttons were nearly flush to the device which made it a lot easier to avoid hitting something you didn’t expect to.

Fingerprint Magnet? It has it.

The Treo Pro is a HUGE fingerprint magnet. I’m not sure if this was some kind of competition they decided to hold with Apple or not, but its a close call. If the Treo ends up being less of a smudger its only because you use a stylus on the screen instead of your finger. But, for all the smudges and wiping away of the smudges, I wouldn’t change the look of the Treo Pro at all. For the first time in history you can actually look at a Treo and think – kinda smexy!

Size

Long gone are the chunky monkey days of the Treo 700 series. The Treo Pro lost a lot of thickness (at least it feels that way). Its a slight bit thicker than the iPhone 3G, but the the iPhone 3G is quite a bit taller so its pretty much a draw. Either way, its a long shot from the Treo 750 brick!

Everything Else

What is everything else you ask? Here’s the part where I stop looking at the Treo Pro for the most part and start looking at all the things the Treo Pro does and all the things it did to drive me nuts. Let me be perfectly clear right now: If the Treo Pro ran iPhone OS – it would be a must buy. But it doesn’t. Let me also stress that these are mostly notes I made while using the device. They aren’t very cleaned up, they don’t have a lot of sentence structure, but they should show my state of mind fairly well.

Included Software
Games – Time for a refresh Microsoft. I love Bubblebreaker as much as the next guy … but come on. Include a couple more please. And yes iPhone naysayers I know the iPhone didn’t include any games at all, but that doesn’t make it right.

Google Maps – no street view but I was impressed how it was able to locate me – and very quickly. Despite being a small screen the maps were quite useable, but I instantly found myself missing the pinch/spread touch aspects of the iPhone screen for navigating the interface. Those +/- spyglass things just don’t work for me.

 
Java is included which let me instantly run Opera Mini and dump PIE (which sucks). Unfortunately either the version of Java installed on the Treo Pro is a fail or much less likely Opera Mini is a fail. For some reason Opera Mini would freeze up after about 5 seconds. which just doesn’t work for me. I ended up back on PIE.

Sprite Backup! – Double Wow on this one. Pay attention Apple. Palm knocked it out of the park including a backup application as good as Sprite Backup on the device. iTunes is not a substitute for a good backup application like Sprite which lets me get to my data without having to do a restore. I can open a backup and pull the data out manually and I can keep multiple backups instead of relying on one as a single point of failure (iTunes).

Mail
Incredibly slow on connecting and downloading compared to iPhone mail. It downloaded 1106 headers which took a couple minutes then downloaded the actual messages (which it failed on twice) over WiFi – complaining I was not connected. The other annoying thing is that it downloaded all of them as unread messages – despite the fact that I was all caught up on email. Turns out that the Treo Pro wasn’t holding a data connection too well at my house, and while I had WiFi on, like an eejit I assumed it would use the WiFi connection for data. Guess not. WinMo fails yet again for not being able to determine that – Hey, I have a WiFi connection, MAYBE I SHOULD USE THE DAMMED THING!

Storage
Found a 1GB MicroSD in my long lost T-Mobile SDA which hasn’t been powered on in months – so I get to test some music and photos. Call me what you will, WinMo gets spanked yet again by the iPhone for displaying photos and playing music. I’ll give them some credit with playing video (simply due to third party programs like coreplayer) but if it wasn’t for third party apps the iPhone would have killed WinMo in videos too.

WiFi / 3G / Edge
This is not a device complaint – but why is the switching between WiFi and cellular data so horrible? My iPhone can do this seamlessly. I can leave Wifi on when I leave the house, go do my thing using cell data, then come home and it will reconnect to WiFi and start using it for data without any interaction from me what so ever. It picks up the network and just uses it. Why is that something WinMo seems to throw up all over itself on?

This is a device complaint: Connection = horrible. I was constantly dropping signal – and I mean constantly in my house. My iPhone never loses a connection here, even though it will occasionally only get 2-3 bars of Edge. I stopped by the AT&T store to get a new SIM card just in case that was the issue. Nope. I can’t give the radio in the Treo Pro a passing grade because it was just horrible compared to the iPhone (in my house). Out on the road it was decent, but if it doesn’t work in my house it does me no good.

At the brink … of destruction. (Reader be warned – next section not so pleasant for young ears)
Not of the device itself (I’m actually quite fond of the Treo hardware) – but of the OS. Windows Mobile is the equivalent of a steaming pile of dog poo on your front doorstep. Actually you know what – that isn’t totally fair. In truth I guess the OS itself is NOT a steaming pile. The OS + all the stuff you have to add on to it to make it useful for you turns it into a steaming pile. The interactions between the OS, 3rd party applications, and the device itself all turns into one absolute nightmare. Here’s how I got there, and why if this was mine, I would have returned it today with a moments hesitation.

Step 1 of Destruction: Google Maps and GPS
First thing is the built in Google Maps Application. WHY would you include Google Maps on a device equipped with GPS and NOT have it default to using the GPS radio when I pick the “locate” option? I can understand having the option to use or not use the GPS since it can be a battery killer – but for most people they are going to assume that GPS is going to be used by default, NOT that they have to chose that from a sub-menu. Second, why if you aren’t going to use GPS by default can I not have an option to change it so that GPS is always used by default? This is a great application – destroyed by poor implementation and horrible understanding of the user. I mean is it that hard to figure out that when I pick the “my location” option I might want to know where the heck I am ACUURATELY?! To make matters worse, without the GPS the best I’ve been able to get is within 900 meters of my location – That’s almost a fricking Kilometer away and completely non-useful when I’m trying to get directions. It’s still pissing me off even now.

Step 2 of Destruction: PIE / Opera / Iris
I’m not going to hammer on Pocket Internet Explorer too much. As I understand it there is a MUCH NEEDED update coming and I hope for the sake of Microsoft that this new version hits the ball out of the park, because for all the talk about how good Opera Mobile 9.5 is or how good Iris is … between the three of them there is isn’t a single good experience to be had. If you’re sitting there having used an iPhone (for more than a few minutes and aren’t a WinMo or BlackBerry fanboy) and telling yourself that PIE, Opera and Iris are good mobile browsers, you’re only telling yourself lies. You’re lying to yourself and all the people who listen to you.

Opera has three text sizes: Can’t read it with a magnifying glass and 3 characters per page. Yes, that’s only two – but all three are absolutely useless. The small setting just makes black dots on the screen, Medium makes indistinguishable blurs on the screen and Large prints 5 rows of one word per row. Oh – and OPERA – If I wanted your browser to be my default browser I would dammed well ask. Don’t just assume I want this pile to take over everything, because you know what? When you do that you HOARK up other stuff… (more on that in a minute).

Iris – you guys are coming close to Safari – but you’re not there yet and you’ve got quite a distance to travel. I know the browser is based on the same source, but that doesn’t make it work without effort as I’m sure you guys know. I’m not going to point a finger here but the performance was dismally slow. Scrolling through the iPhone version of the Google Reader service was “chunky” at best (I’d say close to) 10 frames per second which is hard to watch – but hey at least Iris can display it. Opera died a 1000 horrible deaths even trying to open the “real web” version of Google reader, however it had slightly better than dismal performance on the iPhone G-Reader page.

While we’re on the topic of Opera, can someone explain to me why even when Opera is NOT running (I checked task manager) and I try to open a link from CEtwit does it determine that for some reason I want to see all the Opera Widgets in the programs menu but NOT the link I tried to open?! I had to reboot the Treo in order to get that crap to stop happening. Again, the interaction between applications once they are installed is HORRIBLE. Without question this so far has been the ABSOLUTE WORST user experience I’ve EVER had on a device of this nature and frankly again it stems from the complete lack of usability of the native applications and the absolutely terrible “I am the king” memory management model. Any application can take over at any time and completely destroy all other functions of the device. For a giggle, load up the “real web” version of Google reader on Opera and then try to answer a phone call. My bet is you don’t get to answer that phone call because Opera is absolutely devastating the processor/memory on your device. That should not happen and shouldn’t be allowed to happen on a SMARTPHONE.

And still on the topic, this is most likely the version of Java on the Treo Pro – but nice work on making Opera Mini completely useless, useless to the point where I have to load up the task manager and kill Opera Mini & JAVA because it can’t get past the loading bar. Now sure – I COULD go out and find another version of Java and install it. I could because I’m smart enough to accomplish such a task, but I shouldn’t have to. Much like I shouldn’t have to tell Google Maps every time I use it that I want to use the GPS chip, I shouldn’t HAVE TO go out and find a new version of Java just to get something as simple as Opera Mini (a JAVA app) to run. If its included in the ROM – it had better work flawlessly. In other words – PALM – if you’re going to include it in the ROM for your device it has better be best of breed, never fail, 99.999% uptime, bulletproof software.

Final Disposition

You see all that brink of destruction stuff? See it up there? THAT WAS ONE DAY!

So can you see why I ended up putting the device down? I made it almost a week with the Treo Pro. Almost. And it wasn’t the device that made me put it away – it was the horrible implementation of the user interface, the horrible memory management, the horrible 3rd party application interactions, the horrible lack of understanding of the user, and just plain and simple it was the HORRIBLE experience I had from WinMo.

I said it before and I’ll say it here again as my final words: If the Treo Pro ran iPhone OS – it would be a must buy. But it doesn’t.