Palm Treo 755p Cell Phone Review - Multimedia

Alfredo Padilla
Published on December 20, 2007 Comment on this

Accessing Music Software (8.70)

The Treo 755p took only 2.3 seconds to get a song playing. As we've done in many other areas we make use of the keyboard shortcuts on the home screen to just hit "p" to get us close to the pTunes software and then navigate down once and launch it. The Treo 755p is once again a champion of timing tests, putting up the best time amongst our comparison phones. It even did significantly better here than the Palm Centro, with only the Sidekick LX coming close to the 755p's time.

Cell Phone	Time (sec)	Score
Palm Treo 755p	2.3	8.70
Palm Centro	3.22	6.21
Palm Treo 750	4.36	4.59
BlackBerry Curve 8320	7.62	2.62
T-Mobile Shadow	4.9	4.08
Sidekick LX	2.46	8.13

Dedicated Music Controls (1.0)
Aside from the volume keys, which of course control volume, the Treo 755p doesn't have any dedicated music controls. These are controls that relate to music functions while on the home screen. You can set a preference in pTunes to have one of the buttons on the device bring up the program when music is playing, but this is turned off by default.

Music Software Functionality and Organization (8.0)

Like all the other Palm OS devices we've see music playback is handled by pTunes. This program is provides a good selection of music functionality but isn't as good as the Series 60 music player or even Windows Media Player Mobile on Windows Mobile devices. pTunes was able to recognize our playlists and is also able to create and edit them on the device. It recognized tags for all our file types and allows you to sort music by title, artist, album or genre. Unfortunately there's no support for searching through your music, album art or rating music. Background play is supported and there's an equalizer on board as well. The interface is a little clunky, with some fiddling required before you figure out how to switch between controls and playlists in an efficient manner. Overall solid, but nothing special.

Online Song Downloading (0.0)
Like the Palm Centro from Sprint the Treo 755p does not support their music store. We know that the device supports Java programs so the DRM must be the issue here.

Streaming (4.0)
The Treo 755p supports streaming audio in Mp3 and Windows Media formats, but not Real.

Podcast Support (0.0)
The Treo 755p doesn't have any software to download or organize podcasts.

Music Sync with PC (7.0)
Music can be easily synchronized with a PC using the standard Windows Media Player interface. The memory card on the device is recognized by the software and you can set up sync lists or just move music back and forth manually.

Music Formats and DRM (3.0)
The Treo 755p supports AAC, Mp3 and WMA music files but doesn't support any form of DRM protected music.

Music Interruption (10.0)
If a call comes in while you're listening to music the Treo 755p will handle it like a champ, pausing music automatically and starting it up again when the call ends.

Video

Video Software Access (6.90)
The Treo 755p took only 2.9 seconds to get a video playing, which is a very good time. Once again we used keyboard shortcuts to jump near the Pics & Videos software, then just navigate over and hit the select key three times to get a video playing. Also familiar is the Treo 755p topping our list of comparison phones in a timing test, as you can see below.

Cell Phone	Time (sec)	Score
Palm Treo 755p	2.9	6.90
Palm Centro	3.16	6.33
Palm Treo 750	6.88	2.91
BlackBerry Curve 8320	8.08	2.48
T-Mobile Shadow	8.92	2.24
Sidekick LX	n/a - no vide playback	0.00

Video Controls (4.0)
Video playback on the Treo 755p is handled by the album software and the controls are pretty basic. Videos automatically go into full screen mode, although most videos aren't formatted for the Treo 755p's square screen so there will be bars above and below it. The volume keys control volume, of course, and the center select button stops playback and takes you back to the album screen. Left and right move to the next or previous video while up/down reveals on screen controls that are no different than what you can do with the hardware keys. Phones with more dedicated video software like the Curve or Treo 750 provided better options for video controls.

Video Software & Organization (1.5)
As we mentioned above the Treo 755p uses the album software for video playback. This means that the features are limited. There's no support for ratings, playlists, background play or library organization. Anyone who wants to organize and watch a lot of videos on the Treo 755p should consider some alternate software like Coreplayer.

Video Sync with PC (7.0)
Just like music you can use Windows Media Player on your PC to synchronize video over to the Treo 755p.

Video Formats (4.0)
The Treo 755p was able to handle 3GP, Mpeg-4 and H264 encoded video. It wasn't able to handle other file types like Quicktime, Flash, Windows Media Video or Real.

Video DRM (0.0)
The Treo 755p can't handle any DRM protected video like those purchased from iTunes or Amazon's Unboxed.

Video Playback Smoothness (10.0)
The Treo 755p was able to handle all five of our test videos up to 768 kbps. This means it can play back pretty high quality video, which only makes the poor video software even more frustrating.

Online Video Downloading (0.0)
The Treo 755p does not support any direct video download services.

Video Streaming unscored
We don't score this this section because there's really no standard for streaming video to mobiles. We do test some popular sites to see if they work, however. We were very pleased to see that streaming 3GP video from zoovision.com and Youtube Mobile both worked, as did streaming Windows Media Video from windowsmedia.com. Sprint also offers a wide variety of pay streaming services via the Sprint TV program.

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