Palm Treo 755p Cell Phone Review - Messaging

Alfredo Padilla
Published on December 20, 2007 Comment on this

Supported Email Services (7.5)
As we've seen from other Palm OS devices Versamail is the principal email client on the Treo 755p. Versamail supports POP3 and IMAP4 email services. It also makes it easy to set up a variety of popular email services like Gmail, AOL and Yahoo.

Push Email (3.0)
The Treo 755p supports Push email via Activesync with an Exchange account. There is also a BlackBerry connect client for Palm OS available, but this doesn't come standard on the 755p.

Multiple Email Accounts (10.0)
The Treo 755p supports more than five email accounts, although it can only support a single Exchange account at a time.

HTML and Attachments (4.0)
HTML email is still not supported by the Palm OS platform, so you might get a bunch of gobbledygook when you go to open an HTML heavy email. You can view and edit Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents as well as view PDF documents via the included Documents2Go software. There's no support for zip files, but there are plenty of third party programs that will add this functionality if you need it.

Email Customizations (5.0)
The Treo 755p allows you to choose from three display fonts, with some of them providing multiple font sizes. You can also create signatures for outgoing emails and decide whether to view messages in your inbox on one or two lines. All in all a good selection of email customizations.

Time to a New Message (9.09)

The Treo 755p took 2.2 seconds to create a new email message. This is an excellent time, but as you can see below many of our comparison phones also have very good times in this test. This is not surprising as they are all email focused devices. We were a little surprised that the Treo 755p was a little slower than the Palm Centro, but the difference isn't great. To do this test we time how long it takes to go from the home screen unlocked until we have a new email dialogue on screen.

Cell Phone	Time (sec)	Score
Palm Treo 755p	2.2	9.09
Palm Centro	1.86	10.75
Palm Treo 750	2.23	8.97
BlackBerry Curve 8320	1.7	11.76
T-Mobile Shadow	4.2	4.76
Sidekick LX	2.22	9.01

Email Usability (9.5)

As we mentioned above the Treo 755p ships with Versamail, which is a fairly straightforward email client. Messages are in a list with sender, subject and date shown. The D-Pad moves you up or down the list and there are three buttons at the bottom of the touch screen for quick access to common commands. Sorting options include subject, sender, size or date. The only major problem is that if you're managing several email accounts you need to go into the menu system to switch between them. This is annoying and we would have preferred to have an on screen shortcut for this functionality.

Supported IM Services (0.0)

The Treo 755p doesn't actually ship with a built in IM client. There's an icon on the program screen for it, but this just takes you to Sprint's website where you can download the free application. We're not sure why they didn't just load it on the phone. Sprint's IM client allows you to access AIM, Yahoo and Windows Live IM services. Unfortunately every instant message you send or receive counts against your SMS messages, regardless of whether you have purchased an unlimited data plan. This means you can rack up a nasty bill real quick. We feel that if you have paid for unlimited data transfer on the device this should also cover IM, so we won't be awarding any points in this section.

MMS Support (9.0)

MMS is very well done on the Treo 755p, as it has been on every Palm OS device we've reviewed. The messaging applications handles both SMS and MMS and doesn't distinguish between the two. All you have to do to turn a message into an MMS is add some media to it. You can also easily send an MMS from the album software or the camera application.

SMS Smiley Face Interpretation (10.0)
Those who love smiley faces love Palm devices, and for good reason. Not only does the Treo 755p's excellent text messaging application turn smileys into their graphical equivalents, but they also make it very easy to insert a smiley from a small pop up menu. Very well done.

SMS/MMS Ease of Use (8.0)

The Palm OS SMS/MMS messaging application is one of the best we've seen on any phone. Not only is there no unnecessary separation between SMS and MMS messages but its also very easy to use. Especially with the threaded messaging feature that organizes your SMS messages into conversations. Many people may have become familiar with this because the iPhone does it, but it was actually Palm that did it first and still, in our opinion, does it better.

Time to a New SMS Message (11.11)
Like all Palm OS devices we've reviewed the Treo 755p is very quick at getting a new SMS dialogue on screen at 0.9 seconds. You can see below that the only comparison phone that competes with the 755p was the Palm Centro, with all the other phones putting up good, but not quite as spectacular times. To do this test we time how long it takes to go from the home screen unlocked until we have a new SMS dialogue on screen. With the Treo 755p we just tap on the messaging button and then tap on the new button on screen. Power texters will love how easy this is.

Cell Phone	Time (sec)	Score
Palm Treo 755p	0.9	11.11
Palm Centro	0.86	11.63
Palm Treo 750	2.36	4.24
BlackBerry Curve 8320	4.22	2.37
T-Mobile Shadow	1.98	5.05
Sidekick LX	1.86	5.38

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