Palm Treo 755p Cell Phone Review - Software

Alfredo Padilla
Published on December 20, 2007 Comment on this

OS (8.0)
The Treo 755p runs the latest version of Palm OS. Of course the word "latest" there requires some explanation. Palm OS hasn't been upgraded for years, so "latest" is actually pretty out of date. Rivals like Windows Mobile and Symbian have gone through several iterations while Palm OS has essentially stood still. Palm is working on an updated version of their OS that is supposed to be out in late 2008 or early 2009, but given their struggles lately you have to wonder if that will ever see the light of day.

Criticisms aside, Palm OS still does deliver a lot of value. Despite not seeing a significant upgrade in awhile it still performs admirably in several departments, including ease of use and responsiveness. Users will be able to pick up the Treo 755p and start figuring things out on their own. It also provides more than enough power for most users and is very extensible with literally thousands of third party applications available. Despite being long in the too the Palm OS is still a worthy buy for those who are looking for an easy to use smart phone experience.

Home Screen Score (4.0)

The Treo 755p is similar to BlackBerry devices in that it's basically just a grid of application icons. This is in contrast to Windows Mobile and Symbian devices that have home screens that gather information from around the device and make it easily accessible. The Palm OS home screen does have its bonuses, you can easily jump to an application by pressing the letter that matches the first letter of the name. You can also assign applications to categories and then filter the list by these categories, with multiple presses on the home button switching between them. That being said we would have preferred to see a more modern integrative home screen.

Extensibility (6.0)
Palm OS is one of the most extensible platforms out there with thousands of native third party applications available for installation. Unfortunately the Treo 755p doesn't support java applications out of the box. Instead you will need to install a separate java virtual machine to install and use java programs. This is in contrast to Symbian devices that run Java applications natively.

Customizability (6.0)
The Treo 755p is not as customizable as other platforms. We've mentioned many of the customizations you can make already, including the ability to categorize and filter your applications and assigning applications to a long press of any letter key on the QWERTY. You can also choose from various "themes", which really just change the color scheme of the interface. Compared to other phones that have themes that change the whole look and feel of the device these are just not very impressive.

OS Responsivness (9.0)
Despite being long in the tooth, Palm OS is still one of the fastest operating systems we've seen on any phone, much less a smart phone. It runs circles around Symbian and Windows Mobile and is even faster than the iPhone interface.

Browser Features (8.0)

Blazer on the Treo 755p may not provide the best interface but it does tick a lot of the web technology check boxes. It supports both WAP and HTML pages as well as javascript, frames, images, cookies and encryption. More advanced web technologies like Flash, Java and RSS are not supported, but you can save images or web pages using Blazer. This makes it as good as all but the most advanced mobile web browsers from a pure technology standpoint.

Browsing Interface (3.5)

Where Blazer doesn't do as well is in the interface department. Like many mobile browsers Blazer reformats web pages to fit in a single column width so you can just scroll up or down. Moving left/right on the D-pad moves between links on the page. This is a pretty efficient design for a mobile web browsers but given that new browsers like Safari on the iPhone and Web on Series 60 devices have allowed us to view "full" web pages on mobile devices this just feels a little out of date. Plus the reformatting can produce some ugly results, especially with complex pages.

The browser history is a simple list of sites while bookmarks have a curious interface with 10 bookmarks in two column arrangement per page and ten pages available. This means you can bookmark a lot of pages, but you can't create folders to better organize them. Functions can be accessed via on screen icons, by calling up the menu with the menu button or by using keyboard shortcuts. Once you get the hang of everything, you can get around pretty easily, but this doesn't make up for the poor rendering. Blazer just feels old, and it's probably because it is.

Browser Access (8.00)
It takes five steps to launch the web browser and open a specific page on the Treo 755p. As you can see below, this is pretty good. Only the Sidekick LX did better in this test than the Treo 755p did. We count steps in this test instead of using a timed test because we don't want network issues to interfere with the score.

Cell Phone	Steps	Score
Palm Treo 755p	5	8.00
Palm Centro	5	8.00
Palm Treo 750	8	5.00
BlackBerry Curve 8320	11	3.64
T-Mobile Shadow	8	5.00
Sidekick LX	4	10.00

Gaming (7.0)
The Treo 755p comes with one full-version game, which is better than so many phones we're seeing nowadays that don't come with anything but demo versions. On top of that the game on the 755p is a good one, everybody's favorite time-killer, bejeweled. We found the controls on the Treo 755p to be very good for games, particularly the D-Pad which is large and rarely leads to mistaken presses. There's also a large selection of games available for Palm OS. The Treo 755p isn't a gaming powerhouse but it will provide you with some down time if you need it.

Calculator (9.0)

As we've seen on other Palm OS devices the calculator on the Treo 755p is very good. Not only is there a solid standard calculator but you can also switch the view to get many advanced functions including square roots, logs and a variety of others. You could use this as a calculator to get through high school algebra no problem.

Alarm (2.0)

The world clock application on the Treo 755p offers a very simple alarm that just lets you set an alarm for the following 24 hour period. If you want it to go off every day you'll have to reset it every day and forget about any more complex recurrence patterns or multiple alarms.

Document Software (7.0)
The Treo 755p includes the excellent Documents2Go software to handle your document needs and it does a very solid job. Documents2Go handles viewing and editing Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents and viewing PDF documents as well. It's nice to see Palm and Sprint go to the expense of including this software on the device instead of making customers go out and buy it themselves.

Other Software (1.0)

In addition to the software mentioned above the Treo 755p includes Google Maps, which we think is software worthy of a bonus point. Google Maps, of course, allows you to look up directions and do local business searches. It's a valuable tool and even though it's available as a free download having it installed on the device just makes things easier.

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