Gadgetory

this is terry davis for pocket now calm and this is the unboxing video for the palm treo 500 so if we're open the box the first thing we come to is the manuals and the CD now in here you have a quick reference guide which is actually a complete user guide for how to use the device and how to use windows mobile 6 standard there's also a quick start guide which shows you what you can expect to find in the box and also have to charge the phone and use it for the first time and then the all-important software CD which contains active sync which allows you to connect your device to your PC and synchronize and copy files across now if I just take out the battery and the phone I'll put them to one side for a second I'll comes thurs in a moment so look what's actually in the box as far as accessories go now the first thing we come across is the sync and charge cable which is this time you can see they they've opted to use a mini USB to USB connector rather than a proprietary connector which they used on the Centro and that's a much better a better option because most people have these lying around from cameras or other devices around the house so if you lose the original then it's easy to replace it and even if you can't have one around the house then it's easy to pick these upon on ebay or somewhere so that's great that's that's your sink in charge which allows you to connect your phone to your PC and obviously to to charge it and copy things across so that's there the headphone headset this time is a stereo headset which contains which comes with a 3.5 millimeter standard Jack blood connector and has an inline microphone so you can use that for listening to your music or your your movies or you can use it for a headset for four in your car to hands-free in your car now again they supplied the charger just as they did with the palm centro which is the phone connector block with a flip-down us a connector but then it has a three round the world converters so you can slip these on sir there and then you can plug it in pretty much anywhere around the world so traveling that's a great idea and again it's the mini USB connector there so you can you can plug that and charged that on the go so that's what's in the box as far as accessories go and in a second I'll come to the phone itself so moving on let's have a look at the device itself on the front of the device you have a 240 x 320 pixel screen and below the screen you have a standard configuration of buttons there you've got your hang up and answer Corbin's and then because it's windows mobile standard and it's not a touchscreen you have your left and right softkey menu hardware buttons below those you have a home button which will take you immediately back to your home screen from anywhere in the applications and then there's a backwards navigation key which will take you sequentially back through the steps you've just taken in the center there's a d-pad a raised d-pad which makes it nice needed to use and in the center of that there's a select button so you can easily navigate through your programs and applications below there you have a 34 key qwerty keyboard which is designed just nicely for your thumbs to be able to type text messages and to use in applications such as word looking at the top of the device there's an on/off switch which allows you to power the device on and off put into standby mode and then moving around to the left hand side of the screen you have your volume controls now depending on where you are in your applications they do different things they obviously control the media volume as you listening to music but obviously if you're in a call as well then they'll control the call volume below there we have a configurable hotkey which allows you to assign a single application to that and then your single press and you can go straight to the application which is nice if you want to assign something like media player or camera or something like that to it on the bottom of the device there's in the center you have the microphone for phone calls and then either side of that you have the sockets one is your mini USB which is for syncing and charging the device and then you have a pretty connected there which is your three and a half mil jack socket which allows you to plug in your headphones now the nice thing about these through being separate is that you can obviously charge the device and listen to your media at the same time I know in a lot of phones my HTC Titan two for one of them you they both share the same socket they both have a mini USB socket so you have to do one or the other or buy a connector with this you can you can do the same to both at the same time so that's great on moving on to the back of the device there is the speaker for playing multimedia and then there's a 2 megapixel camera for recording video and obviously for recording still photographs now if I just pop the back of the device off here you can have a look and see what's inside the device so at the bottom here is where the sim card goes now if I just take a sim card I can show you then just pop it in there and fairly easily slot the SIM card into the into the socket there so that's your sim card connected and above there you can see there's a small connector which unclips and lifts up now that's for your micro SD card so you slot your microSD card into there like that and then you just clip it down in place and actually micro SD card now let's that's fine it's nice and compact but the obvious drawback there is that if you want to change your SD cards to put it for music in for example then you're going to have to remove your battery which means resetting the device there is room there where they could have put a little slot to allow you to do that but they chose not to so let's pop the battery onto the device and pop the back back on and then what's only back over again okay so if I now switch the device on you can see the keyboard lights will spring to life and the screen will show the palm logo and that's just starting up now now whilst it's just starting up I'll just do a comparison in size to the candy bar phone which is the palm centro you can see if I do a comparison from the front there there's not much difference in in size height wise this does just a slightly slight narrower if you put one on top of the other you can see that the the center is just slightly smaller than the trail in in width thickness is about the same and we can have a look at the screen so there you can see the screen is now started up and you can see the home screen of the palm treo 500 so that is the unboxing video for the palm treo 500 and i'm now going to go away and use this for a week and i'll come back and give you a full review