Palm Treo 750 Cell Phone Review - Multimedia
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Alfredo Padilla Published on March 17, 2007 Comment on this |
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Music and MP3
Accessing Music Software (4.59)
To test how easy it is to access your music, we time how long it takes to go from standby to playing a song in the music program. We configure the music program to point at our test album. The Treo 750 took an average of 4.36 seconds to get a song playing. This is an average score, worse than the Treo 700p’s 3.1 seconds but slightlly better than the LG Chocolate, which took 4.73 seconds on average. The 750 is helped by the fact that the shortcut key on the left side of the phone is assigned to Windows Media Player by default. Note thought that this process can be significantly longer when storing your music on your storage card as every time you relaunch Windows Media Player Mobile you need to manually point to the library on the storage card as opposed to on the handset. This isn't a problem if you just let the program run in the background on a regular basis.
Dedicated Music Controls (4.0)
The Treo 750 does not provide any dedicated keys for controlling your music while it plays in the background apart from the volume keys, which are simply controlling universal volume. As a business device, this is not functionality that we would expect to see out of the 750, still it would have been nice. Shortcut key on side mapped to Windows Media Player.
Music Software Functionality and Organization (4.2)
The Treo 750 uses Windows Media Player for music playback. This software does support playlists imported from Windows Media Player on the desktop, however, it does not support standard .pls playlists, nor does it allow you to create and manage playlists on your device. Windows Media Player will recognize standard idv3 tags from Mp3 files, and also recognizes windows media tags. Unfortunately, it does not recognize tags from AAC files created in iTunes.
You can browse your music by title, artist, album, or genre. Windows Media Player did not recognize our album art; however, it should support album art imported via Windows Media Player. You can also set a rating for music. You can easily search your device and add media files to your library automatically and as a multi-tasking operating system you can listen to music in the background. Unfortunately, there is no equalizer. Overall, we found Windows Media Player to provide good functionality. We liked it better than the Treo 700p. If you are looking for more functionality, there are an array of third party solutions. We suggest you take a look at Coreplayer.
Online Song Downloading (0.0)
The Treo 750 does not support any online song download services. It should be noted that as of the time of this writing Cingular does not offer any over-the-air music downloads.
Streaming (2.0)
The Treo 750 using Windows Media Player Mobile was only able to stream using the Windows Media standard. We were unable to play streaming audio using either Mp3 or Real audio. We were not surprised that Real Audio was not supported, but we would have very much liked support for standard Mp3 streaming. The Treo 700p was able to handle both Mp3 and Windows Media streaming audio.
Podcast Support (0.0)
The Treo 750 does not include any Podcast download or organization software. At this time, the only major smart phone platform that has this available natively is Series 60’s excellent podcast client.
Music Sync with PC (7.0)
The Treo 750 can synchronize your music with Windows Media Player on a PC. It does not support iTunes, for obvious reasons. Windows Media Player synchronization is handled via activesync and can place your selected playlists directly onto your memory card every time you synchronize with your PC. Music synchronization with a Mac is not supported natively, but it can be achieved through third party software.
Music Formats and DRM (5.0)
The Treo 750 using Windows Media Player Mobile is able to play WMA, AAC, Mp3 and Wav files. It does not support Real or Org Vorbis. In addition, the 750 supports files protected with Microsoft’s PlaysForSure DRM. It does not support files that are encoded with Apple’s Fairplay DRM. The Treo 700p did not support any type of DRM out of the box.
Music Interruption (9.0)
Windows Media Player Mobile on the Treo 750 pauses music automatically when you receive or make a call. When the call is over, music will resume from the point at which it previously paused. We did find a small lag before the music started playing again. The 750 did not handle this as cleanly as the Treo 700p, but only just barely.
Video
Video Software Access (2.91)
To test how easy it is to access video on a phone, we time how long it takes to go from standby to a playing a video. The media software is configured to point to our test video. The Treo 750 uses the same Windows Media Player Mobile to play music and video, however the video access score time was longer due to the fact that we had to navigate more to get to our video file and the program took longer to load it. The Treo 750 took an average of 6.88 seconds to launch a video. This is a poor score, significantly slower than the Treo 700p, which took 5 seconds, but still faster than the Motorola Q’s 8.6 seconds. Just as with music you will need to manually navigate to the libarary on your storage card if that is where you store your video, which will add even more time to the 750's already long average.
Video Controls (9.0)
The Windows Media Player Mobile on the Treo 750 provides a good array of controls for video playback via the D-Pad and soft keys. It also allows you to reconfigure the controls to suit your own needs. The select key on the D-Pad controls Play/Pause, left and right move to the next and previous video in the playlists and act as fast forward and rewind when held down. The left soft key takes you to your currently playing up and down control volume. All other controls are accessed via the touchscreen or the left soft key menu.
Video Software & Organization (6.0)
The Treo 750 uses Windows Media Player Mobile to manage and playback video. As such, the music software functionality and organization section will also provide you a good idea of how it handles. Windows Media Player Mobile automatically updates your library by searching your device; you can initiate this via the left soft key. As with music, you can give videos ratings. The software also supports full screen viewing, although because of the Treo 750’s square screen videos will usually show a letterbox effect in full screen. Compared to the Treo 700p, where the only video software was that used by the album to play back videos you took, the 750’s video software is a big step up. We also like the functionality better than the Real Player that is included with Series 60 devices. In particular, the library management is significantly better. The 750 recieves a better score for video than for music because the competition has set the bar lower in this area.
Video organization on the Treo 750 is very similar to the music organization as they both use Windows Media Player Mobile. You can scan your device to find compatible video files. You can either view all your videos or view them by genre. You cannot search for videos using Windows Media Player Mobile. You can play video in the background. There is support for playlists imported from the desktop version of Windows Media Player, but you cannot create playlists on the device. Compared to the extremely basic video organization software found on the Treo 700p or the poor video organization on Series 60 devices the 750 does very well. That being said we would have liked to see more advanced options, such as choosing between movies and TV shows for example.
Video Sync with PC (7.0)
As with audio, you can synchronize video content with your PC using the desktop version of Windows Media Player and Activesync. You can also synchronize copy protected software such as that bough from Amazon’s Unboxed video store. You cannot synchronize video from iTunes. Compared to other phones where there is no synchronization support, we are quite pleased with the video sync capabilities of the Treo 750.
Video Formats (5.0)
The Treo 750 was able to play back all 3 of our 3GP encoded files as well as our test MP4 and Windows Media Video file. It was not able to play back Flash, Quicktime, or Real Media encoded files. We were pleased with the range of video formats that the 750 was able to handle using Windows Media Player Mobile. This is better than the Treo 700p which only has very basic video software on board.
Video DRM (5.0)
The Treo 750 is able to play back video with Windows Media DRM encoding, such as that sold by Amazon.com’s Unboxed store. It is not able to play back DRM encoded iTunes or Real video. Video DRM has not become widespread aside from iTunes, but it’s nice to see that you have some options with the 750. The Treo 700p does not support any video DRM formats.
Video Playback Smoothness (10.0)
To test video playback smoothness we attempt to play 5 test files ranging from 48 kbps to 768 kbps. We judge how smoothly each clip plays back. The Treo 750 was able to play back each of these five files smoothly and easily, even in full screen mode. This, is much better than the Treo 700p which ran into problems at 360 kbps.
Online Video Downloading (0.0)
The Treo 750 does not support any online video downloading services out of the box.
Video Streaming (unscored)
We do not score streaming video because there the formats available are not standardized yet. We do however test some streaming video sites to see how handsets handle them. The Treo 750 was not able to stream 3GP video from zoovision.com, but it was able to handle Windows Media encoded streaming video from windowsmedia.com. We were disappointed by the inability to stream 3GP video, but again because formats are so varied we cannot draw any definitive conclusions from this.
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