Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon Minnemann from pocketnow.com and in this video we're going to go through the software on the palm before I do I'm gonna show you two things that I missed in the last video the hardware tour the first thing I want to show you is that there's actually an infrared port on the trio Pro you can see it if I kind of tilt the device and the light there there it is we don't see many devices these days with infrared ports but pom decided that it's a needed addition the other thing I want to show you is where the microSD slot is and unfortunately it's behind the battery cover so if I remove the battery cover and look to the other side here you can see it it's kind of right near the stylus silo and they're really hard to reach place and I really don't like that very much I prefer to have it out on the side or on the top or bottom where I can easily swap in a new micro SD card now if you watch the hardware tour video you may remember me talking about the screen and how it has this milky white tint over it that makes it really hard to see outdoors it cuts down on the color contrast and how black blacks appear on the screen well Tom sent me a replacement unit because they they were certain that this wasn't the case and indeed they were right the unit that I had right here was a defective unit with a defective screen let me show you the new version or the new unit I should say where everything seems to be much better in order the blacks are black the colors come out very nicely so look at the black at the top of the screen here on the old model and on the new model the black is just much more black you probably can't tell on YouTube but there's a big difference on this end so scratch what I said about the screen being defective with low contrast and color quality it just was an issue with my particular unit and call me good on it very fast ok so out on the box this is the today's screen that you get on the trio pro you don't get an interface replacement like touchflo 3d but that's ok this is a professional device so palm has kept it clean which we're fine with since this is an HTC device we get the HTC task manager in the upper right corner which lets you close programs selectively or close all of the running programs in Windows Mobile if you want to get back program memory and of course through this task manager you can also select what the X button does in the upper right corner as you know pressing the X button in Windows Mobile hibernates the program it doesn't actually close it and with this program you can change that so here on the Today screen we've standard entries we have quick tour which will just give you an overview of how to use the trio Pro and I find this kind of weird it cuts off the top of the screen Oh miss does this almost as if it's not optimized for a 320 by 320 display I can't read the text on the screen and I'm sure you can't either this is very silly I don't know why that is what you see down here is the weather and the time here in Philadelphia Tokyo and Los Angeles this is a trial version of world meet unfortunately you don't get the full version of world mate which is kind of silly I mean I just bought this five hundred and fifty dollar device and palm only includes the trial version but that said world made is a good program this is the main interface we can click on weather center and get weather for the next five days if we click on satellite it tells you hey you got to pay for it if you want to see it which I'm not going to do if we click world weather that's something that we can use without paying the price for the software and there are other things that this program can do which are pretty cool I'll cover it in the review there are a bunch of converters that we can use if we're traveling so it's a pretty good tool if you're traveling I just wish that pom would have included the full version of that so let's go into the Start menu from the Start menu we can off open office mobile all four programs of office mobile are included so that's good let's go into the Start menu now looking down the Start menu we have communications manager and this is what it looks like it's skinned with a special palm skin looks pretty nice you can turn on Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and everything from this screen we have the camera and I'll talk about the camera in the review it turns out it's not that great of a camera it doesn't have a flash doesn't have autofocus it doesn't take great photos unfortunately going down the list Google Maps is included we've something called internet proxy there which I'm going to talk about in the review I'm going to go back to the today's screen for a second because there's a button here that says internet and Internet will take you to Pocket Internet Explorer unfortunately this device doesn't come with Opera Mobile or a better browser such as Skyfire it just uses Pocket Internet Explorer that said of course I recommend that you download Opera Mobile 9.5 beta it's a fantastic browser I was using it earlier and it renders quite well on the three 28 by 320 screen and here we have seen it calm loaded which is pretty complex webpage and of course an opera mobile you can you can span around by scrolling you can double tap to zoom in on a comet or resize and it works just really well in the Palm Treo Pro now something I should note is that there's no flick scrolling built in to the Palm Treo Pro which is kind of silly so if you go into context or a long list you have to use the scroll bar to move up and down or you can use the d-pad that's unfortunate going down the list we have quick GPS which is assisted GPS so that you can get a faster GPS signal when you're using you know Google Maps or TeleNav or something like that it comes with remote desktop which is pretty nice using remote desktop on a 320 by 320 resolution screen may be difficult but if you're trying to retrieve an email or something and you're on the road and you want to get into your home computer that may be a good thing to use going down the list we have a full version of sprite backup which is good because sprite backup is a really good backup program we have sounds which we'll just link you to the phone settings that will access in a minute but it's a good way it's a good way to quickly access you know the text message sound new message and that sort of thing we've TeleNav but it's just a trial you can't use the voice guided navigation as you would have if you if you actually buy the software we have streaming media so that we can watch mobile streaming videos from mo youtube.com so that's a welcomed addition and that's pretty much it for the Start menu now let's go into settings here in settings we have key guard and what that will do is when you take the device out of standby you can choose to have it require you to do an unlock sequence so that you don't accidentally call your grandmother in the middle of the night going down the list we have standard stuff here we have a full version of Microsoft voice command which is good poms been doing that on all the trio devices over in system we have backlight and there are no settings really for the screen we can't change the contrast we can't do auto adjust it doesn't have a light sensor and that's that's unfortunate I'm right now it's on medium brightness and this is what it looks like at maximum brightness but save battery power I'm going to keep it down a little bit going down the list we have let's check memory we have a bunch of programs open right now the trail pro only has 128 megabytes of RAM which it's enough but if you're doing a lot of multitasking if you're using opera and email and other programs like navigation and that sort of thing you're gonna run pretty low in the device to make it kind of slow I'll talk about performance more in the review and going down the list that's pretty much it let's go into connections where we just have the standard bits that will allow you to modify Wi-Fi and Bluetooth settings and everything like that now something I do like about the trio Pro and you'll find this on any windows mobile device with a keyboard out front is that it's really easy to dial someone's number so if I want to dial Chris I just type his name from the home home screen or that's today's screen and I see all the matches for Chris and from here I can text him I can cause home or as his house number his work number and everything like that and something else that's good about the trio Pro is that you can search Google right from the home screen and that's an easy way to look up things quickly without having to launch pocket Internet Explorer first so the Palm Treo Pro does a really good job at keeping things simple fast and and minimal which is good for the business user but I mean if you look at previous palm devices like the 700 W it really brought along some innovations that we hadn't seen so far in those days for example we could have play pause and rewind and fast-forward controls for our voice mail we could do picture call a picture speed dial from our today's screen it just had a lot of little things search from the home screen that just raised the bar for usability in the windows mobile world the Palm Treo Pro is is very usable I mean it's a great device it just doesn't raise the bar and bring that extra Palm element to the table so that's about it for the Palm Treo Pro watch out for the review on pocketnow.com where we'll talk about battery life we'll take speed benchmarks and talk about everything good in everything bad about the Palm Treo Pro and come up with a conclusion at the end on whether this should be your next phone that's it for now