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Your communication tools can make or break a business trip. Should your next PDA be a ‘berry’ or a Treo? That depends upon your priorities. If it is all about email “berry’” may be best and if your business requires communication multi-tasking, Treo may be the right travel partner.
The Treo in all its incarnations has long been heralded as the world's leading Smart phone. The Treo 650 has: a 312MHz processor, 23.7MB of accessible internal memory, a crisp TFT display, an integrated keyboard, a 300 kilo pixel camera and a whole host of other utterly ingenious features. However, does it compare favorably with the mighty Blackberry?
As a PDA the Treo is far superior. The Palm OS on the Treo allows for a much wider range of applications, including but by no means limited to photo and video capture. This is something the Blackberry lacks entirely, which is surprising considering the Blackberry is the slightly more expensive of the two options. The Treo is also better for accessing the Internet but only slightly. It is given this edge by its clever Blazer browsing software, which the Blackberry just does not have a substantial answer to.
Phone Calls It’s The Network: Making calls and emailing are among the primary tasks the devices were created for. With regards to making calls it is difficult to judge which device is superior as it tends to be determined by whatever network the device uses. However, in general both are adequate for the task of making general calls and a separate mobile phone will certainly not be required. Blackberry’s recent purchase Ascedent software may provide a corporate phone system interoperability benefit in 2007. For emailing the Treo has a wide range of options when sending and retrieving emails. With the Treo it is possible to check emails received through a plethora of email providers, ranging from Yahoo! to EarthLink and many others. However, the Treo doesn't quite match the consistency of performance set by the Blackberry, which more reliably detects each and every email sent to an account without fail. The Treo has been known to be slightly slower in picking up emails and ever so occasionally misses them altogether.
Treo Wins Keyboarding: The keyboard is arguably one of the most important features of any handheld. Get this aspect of the design wrong and the device will become user unfriendly with a clumsy interface. Luckily, there are no such problems with either of these devices, although they do have their respective strengths and weaknesses. The Treo has an intuitive, one letter per key thumboard, which makes writing extremely easy. However, this does mean the keys are very tightly packed together, something which is not helped by the highly compact and somewhat narrow design of the device. In contrast, the most up-to-date Blackberry has two letters per key, which works in conjunction with a predictive text mechanism that is far superior to those found on standard mobile phones. The downfall here comes when inputting something that is a little less predictable, such as a website URL or an email address, which can be slow and tedious because at this point the predictive software fails. Under such circumstances the user has to input words letter by letter but with the extra complication of having to negotiate alternate values for each of the keys.
Overall, if you are looking for a reliable portable email device with a few other features tagged on then the Blackberry is probably for you. However, if you are looking for an all-in-one PDA, phone and digital camera then you will not be left disappointed by the Treo.