Palm Treo Pro Cell Phone Review - Software

The Treo Pro runs the powerful Windows Mobile operating system that's powerful and highly-extensible. Its browser doesn't offer as many of the advanced browsing features of competing devices, but it still makes for a decent browsing experience. The Treo Pro comes with applications allowing you to edit and view Microsoft Office documents as well as an application to connect you to your PC at home or work to browse files - definite bonuses in our book.

OS (8.5)
The Treo Pro runs the Windows Mobile operating system, a very powerful OS. We award a standard number of points to well-known and established operating systems, and the Treo Pro earns 8.5 here based on this scale. We had no problems with the Treo Pro during our time with it, only experiencing occasional lag. At the time of this review, Windows Mobile Professional stands at version 6.1 and is a bit long in the tooth. Version 7.0 is expected in the second half of 2009. We hope that the next version of Windows Mobile will improve its ease of use to keep up with the sleeker and more intuitive smartphone operating systems from Google and Apple.

Home Screen Score (9.0)
As with other Windows Mobile-powered devices, the Treo Pro's home screen, dubbed the Today screen, can display a wealth of information beyond the standard signal strength, date, and battery meter indicators. By default, the Today screen shows an unread message count, upcoming appointments, and a Google search bar.

The home screen

Through the Today panel in the Settings menu, you can add and remove items to show on the Today screen and adjust the order in which they're shown as well. Windows Mobile continues to offer one of the most functional home screens for busy users who want quick information at glance.

The settings to change the Today screen

The home screen also includes the usual indicators you expect, including signal strength and connectivity icons, a battery level indicator, the current time, and the status of the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios.

Extensibility (9.0)
The Windows Mobile operating system is highly extensible, with thousands of applications available to increase a device's functionality and utility. While not every single 3rd-party application will work on the Treo Pro, this still leaves you with a considerable software library from which to choose. Searching on Handango.com shows 87 applications for the Treo Pro in the City Guide category alone. If you want extensibility in your smartphone platform, Windows Mobile is where it's at.

The Treo Pro includes a Java application that allows you to install Java applications as well, increasing its extensibility even more. We successfully installed and ran Opera Mini on the Treo Pro.

We want to note that more smartphone platforms are following the path of the Apple in offering an application portal right on the device capable of browsing 3rd-party applications and selecting to buy/download them directly onto the device. After the iPhone's App Store came the Android Market for the Android OS, and it now seems that Microsoft will be throwing its hat in the ring with their "Skymarket" application store, slated for release with Windows Mobile 7.

Customizability (0.0)
Like most other Windows Mobile devices, the Treo Pro's interface is highly customizable. A few themes are included to change the overall look and colors of menus and far more themes are available on the internet. The Start menu can be customized to show the applications to which you want quick access. As previously mentioned, the Today screen can be customized to show you all the information you want to see at a glance and you can set an image to display as the home screen's background. A Text Size tab in the Screen settings menu allows you to adjust the interface's font size.

The Sounds & Notifications settings menu allows you to set the sounds and on-screen alerts for a number of events. In addition to the physical keyboard, there are several options for text entry on the touchscreen, and you can choose the default entry method that will appear when you choose to use on-screen entry. The only thing the Treo Pro is missing in this area is the ability to change the interface's font, but there are no lack of options for just about everything else.

OS Responsiveness (7.0)
During our time testing and reviewing the Treo Pro, we found it to be pretty responsive, suffering only from occasional lag when key presses didn't appear to register right way, prompting another key press that eventually brought us further than we'd wanted to go. Other than this, the Windows Mobile experience on the Treo Pro is far better than that of the HTC Touch Diamond with its TouchFLO interface active by default, which we found to be quite pretty yet incredibly laggy. Keeping the number of open programs to a minimum will help ensure your Treo Pro runs quickly and we like that you can adjust the Task Manager settings to ensure that selecting the "X" in the top right hand corner can close a program completely rather than just relegating it to the background, bogging down the system unless you're diligent about shutting programs down fully on a regular basis.

Browser Features (8.0)
The Treo Pro comes with the Internet Explorer Mobile browser, and it easily handles WAP and HTML web pages, including JavaScript elements and frames. It can't show Flash or Java elements nor handle RSS feed subscription. You can save images and other files from web pages directly to the device's memory. The browser can also handle encryption encryption and accept cookies, but it doesn't offer password management or the ability to automatically fill in fields for you. Overall, the Treo Pro's browser has a decent feature set that shouldn't set you back at all in your mobile browsing endeavors.

Viewing a page in the browser

Browsing Interface (6.50)
The Treo Pro's browsing interface is quite similar to that of the Treo 750. You have the same 3 viewing options available - column, fit-to-screen, or desktop. The desktop option shows web pages as you'd see them on your computer screen, but requires a great deal of scrolling around on the Treo Pro's small screen to see an entire web page. Your browsing history is shown in the same format - chronologically starting with the most recently viewed pages and it cannot be searched though it is saved between sessions. Using the Zoom menu option allows you to adjust how much of a web page you're viewing, decreasing and increasing the size of the text accordingly.

The browser's menu

Navigating is easily done with the D-pad, though the touchscreen works well to scroll more quickly through link-heavy pages. The left virtual soft menu key is the Back key and the right virtual soft menu key brings up the Menu. You can set a home page in the Options menu, a feature sorely missing from the iPhone 3G in comparison.

The Zoom level menu

You can create bookmarks, called Favorites, and organize them into folders. You can manually clear cookies and your browsing history. Beyond this, there are no advanced browsing features, like the ability to have multiple browser windows open at once, available on the Treo Pro out of the box.

The Favorites list

Browser Access (13.33)
To see how easy it is to access a web page, we count the number of steps it takes to bring up a test site. We do this instead of timing how long it takes in order to remove internet connectivity and hardware difference between devices out of the equation. We start from the default home screen in the unlocked state and end when the test web page is shown, counting the entry of the URL as a single step. On the Treo Pro, with its right virtual soft menu key designated as a browser shortcut out of the box and the navigation bar highlighted right away for immediate URL entry, it's a quick 3 steps, the least required out of all our comparison phones.

Gaming (4.33)
The Treo Pro comes with 2 games, Solitaire and Bubble Breaker. Both are full, not trial, versions and are only mildly interesting but do-able to pass the time if you're in dire need of entertainment. Many more games are available for the Treo Pro as a Windows Mobile device, of course, so it's possible to greatly increase the device's entertainment quotient.

The two games included with the Treo Pro

The Treo Pro's smaller screen isn't ideal for involved game play and doesn't present nearly the same game face as the T-Mobile G1 and iPhone 3G with their large, bright, and very sensitive touchscreens, but the Treo Pro's D-pad and touchscreen offer good control options for a wide variety of games.

Playing Bubble Breaker

Calculator (6.0)
The Treo Pro's calculator is identical to that on the Treo 750. You can calculate square roots and percentages plus all the standard arithmetic functions, but nothing more complicated. While this level of functionality is on par with most of our comparison phone, it falls behind the iPhone 3G with its full scientific calculator in landscape orientation.

The Treo Pro's calculator

Alarm (8.0)
The Treo Pro's alarm application is found in the Clock & Alarms panel in Settings, so don't go hunting for it in the Programs folder.

The Treo Pro's alarms

You can set up to 3 alarms and there is a good amount of flexibility available. You can name an alarm, determine on which days of the week it should go off, set a specific alarm sound, specify if it will vibrate at the same time, and whether or not the light will flash as well. This level of functionality should suit most users who use their cell phone as an alarm clock to get out of bed in the morning or to trigger other events, and the only thing we wish for is the ability to have more than 3 alarms set at once.

Document Software (8.0)
The Treo Pro comes with mobile versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, in which you can create and edit documents. PDF documents can be opened, but not edit, with the included Adobe Reader LE software. Business users will value this level of document functionality on the Treo Pro since it enhances the ability to be even more productive away while away from a computer.

The Office Mobile software

Other Software (1.0)
The Treo Pro comes with Remote Desktop Mobile installed, an application that allows you to connect to a computer in a remote location and access its files and programs. Setting this up could be a little tricky for computers behind a corporate firewall and it only works with PCs, but it could a useful application when it's not feasible or possible to save certain files to your Treo Pro.

The Remote Desktop access software

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