Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon Minnemann from pocketnow.com and in this video we're gonna take a look back at a very important smartphone called the Palm Treo 700w that some of you may remember this device came out in late 2005 early 2006 on the verizon wireless network and it was a really big deal because it was the first time that palm put Windows Mobile on one of their devices this is a palm device running Windows Mobile it was totally unheard of until this device came around prior to the 700w there were the trio line of palm devices which ran the old palm operating system that a lot of people actually liked and used a lot the trail of devices came way before the iPhone and way before Android and way before the fancy form factors we get in Windows Mobile and it was the true smartphone of the early 2000s that had a really great form factor so let's talk more about the 700w this device was selling for about $600 without a contract back in late 2005 early 2006 for with a two-year contract you can get it for about $400 which by today's standards is very expensive for a even high very high-end smartphone in terms of other specs the device has a CPU clock of 312 megahertz it's run running the old intel xscale processor not too fast of a device it also is a huge deficiency of RAM that only is 32 megabytes newer devices have you know 256 to 512 megabytes of RAM it also only has 128 megabytes of ROM so you're not going to be able to store that many files on this device the screen is a small 2.5 inches diagonal with 240 by 240 resolution the smallest or the lowest resolution that Windows Mobile's can support and in a minute you're gonna say how grainy the screen is it also has bluetooth 1.2 it's got a 1.3 megapixel camera on the back with soft portrait mirror you don't see those too often these days it's got a very large 1800 milliamp hour battery one of the great things about this device was the battery life and it also has a video one of the earlier devices to have this 3G built-in so let's take a look at the hardware what made this device so famous well it's really comes down to the keyboard and the hardware keys here which were known very well in the trio world so we have a very nice spacious keyboard with a nice ergonomic curve we have a lot of hardware buttons that makes the device very one-handed usable so you didn't have to really lift lift up your thumb to press on the screen you had the start menu button and the OK button and the d-pad and soft keys here all within reach of your thumb which made it very easy to to use the device going over to the side we have volume up and down rocker and this button which probably is a record button down here we have extremely unstandardized X it's great that most OEM s have standardized by now looks like we have a 2.5 millimeter headphone jack here instead of 3.5 which isn't very standard going over the other side we have nothing on the top we have support for a standard SD and here they don't see that it's all microSD now and of course that palm feature that they still employ on their devices of today the silent quick switch up here here we've infrared to transfer data elbows mention this does have bluetooth we have a very predominant antenna here all antennas of today are fortunately internal we have a speaker 1.3 megapixel camera and then the large battery back there the stylus is actually quite nice it is a non collapsible metal stylus very high quality fortunately with the hardware buttons you really didn't have to take out the stylus too much and this device was considered to be a nice looking sleek device but sort of as a comparison let's take a look at this next to one of pomace more recent devices the palm pixi so they've come a really long way and what you can really tell the difference is in is depth it's really remarkable I think you could probably stack three Pixies or maybe two and a half and reach the depth of the 700 w 700 W is a very thick device palm has come a long way they still that sort of chiclet style keyboard although they took away the curve here for the for the pixie and on the back there's not many similarities they've totally changed the design internal antenna very sleek very not sleek and sort of crude so let's turn on this thing and see what it's got it's running Windows Mobile 5.0 this is the days when they called this the Pocket PC Phone operating system so we have a nice backlight here all of the keys are backlit and they're kind of backlit unevenly I don't know if you can see that in the video let's get closer in on the screen we're gonna see this ugly ugly Windows Mobile interface with no enhancements and it's funny because you can take a windows mobile device of today and make it look like this if you disable all the homescreen plugins so let's get in here a little bit the screen actually was very sensitive because it was recessed and because the two layers that needed to touch each other were so close together very sensitive screen we can go into programs obviously no finger friendliness you have to use the scroll bars all the time or you could use the d-pad and the icons look very grainy because it's a low resolution screen we still have the same game as we have today in Windows Mobile we've ActiveSync calculator camera which doesn't take too great of pictures and we have this sort of default in Windows mobile camera viewer and so I can take a picture there probably isn't gonna come out too well and we can exit that and continue down the line all the stuff we still see in Windows Mobile devices of today File Explorer of course we can browse your device going into the windows directory take so longest but that was actually pretty quick overall it's pretty snappy so far it's just when you multitask things get very slow we have the verizon wireless sync program we have word mobile which let's try this keyboard and see how how how quick it is so a very nice keyboard a lot of space to work with and and it has a nice bit of tactile feedback very responsive as well so we just did a little bit of a test of the keyboard and let's get out of this and see what else we have let's go into the settings and accidentally hit that is why you cannot use your finger in an older version of Windows Mobile it's really not made for finger friendliness so let's get a little bit closer in on the screen and take a look at the old settings of Windows Mobile 5.0 so we can customize the buttons and there were a fair amount of buttons that you could change on the 700w which was nice you could launch programs without having to dive into the interface we've keyguard owner information phone this came with microsoft voice command which was actually unheard of for a device of the late 2005 era 2006 which allows you to control the device with your voice today's screen we can really have all the standard windows mobile stuff there we go into system we get to see a little bit more about what we're dealing with backlight we do not have a a light sensor here and obviously not a proximity sensor so here you can manually adjust the brightness at full brightness the screen actually looks pretty good but of course your battery life is gonna suffer hugely see what else we have in here error reporting standard stuff let's take a look at memory we are down to 11 megabytes of RAM if I open up another program it's probably not going to perform very well forget about running something on the internet and by the way we've got the old old version of Pocket Internet Explorer here which did a horrible job at a trend during websites I mean you would get extremely long scroll bars and really nothing would render very properly so and then they have made improvements hugely in an Internet Explorer mobile and going down the list we have some other stuff aligned the screen of course enable cleartype which really helps to to make things look better and we can align the screen a lot of newer devices really don't require this but maybe once every year or so if that but some of these older windows mobile devices really requires you to align the screen in fact when I use this for the first time it had been about a year and the screen was totally out of alignment and finally you can go into connections we see the standard stuff that we're used to this device did not have Wi-Fi it looks like it didn't even have a connections manager as we find an ever windows mobile device disorder manage all of your connections and here we have beamed so to get someone else with a similar device you could put them together and send a file over it's pretty cool back in the day so that was a quick look at the Verizon trio 700 W a device that was really really big especially for the smartphone communities the first time palm took their legendary hardware and they were kings in the early 2000s for smartphones and used the power of Windows Mobile we were very happy in the Windows Mobile community I was just reading the review from Chris spera back in 2005 about this device he was extremely excited about it we look back at it now it's not so exciting but it definitely was at that point in time so that was a look back at the Verizon trio 700 W that's it for now