Treo 700w Review: Part 3

Happy New Year Treonauts!!!  I hope that you had a fantastic time celebrating and my Very Best Wishes for a Fun, Healthy & Prosperous 2006!

This year promises to be one of the most exciting yet for Treonauts thanks to an amazing total of four new Treo smartphones to be released in 2006 starting with the Treo 700w running Windows Mobile whose official commercial release should be announced later today (Palm just launched two dedicated Treo 700w pages on its website) at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas from where I will be writing for the next five days.

In the meantime, as promised and evidently anxiously awaited by many, below is my third installment of the Treo 700w review where I’ll be taking a closer look at the Tasks and Notes functionalities.  As before, in parentheses I add my personal opinion judging whether I consider each function to be better or worse overall than on our existing PalmOS based Treo 650.

5. Tasks (Equal)

Playing around with the Tasks application is the first instance where you quickly come to realise how annoying it is that the Treo 700w does not have a dedicated Programs/Applications button like on the Treo 650 (found at the top left next to the 5Way).

In order to access your Tasks you need to 1) press the Windows button; 2) scroll down to Programs or press ‘P’ on the keyboard; 3) scroll down to Tasks or press ‘T’ then scroll if you have more than one application starting with the letter T.  This is one cumbersome click more than on the Treo 650 and one which ‘could’ have been avoiced by simply providing the option to ‘Press + Hold’ the Windows button to directly access the Programs list quickly but this is not the case.  Alternatively, Palm/Microsoft could have provided a Shortcuts functionality where “Press + Hold ‘T’” or “Option + ‘T’” would launch the Tasks for example but as I’ve mentioned earlier I have found the overall customization options to be very limited on the Treo 700w.

Once in Tasks though, I very much like the fact that you can immediately start typing using the Treo 700w keyboard to quickly create a plain new task (no Priority, Status, etc) followed by the Return key without having to press either New or 5Way thus making it one click faster than the Treo 650.

If you want to set a more complex task which includes fields such as Priority, Status, Start/Due, Occurrance(s), Reminder, Categories, Sensitivity as well as Notes then you’ll need to press the New button at the bottom left of the screen which will open the Task Detail pages below.

Selecting and then pressing the Center 5Way button will bring up the Task Summary page (below right) and you can press the Edit button to make changes.

Unfortunately, again using one wasteful click, Palm/Microsoft have not provided the Edit option using the Press + Hold functionality (below left).  Additionally, the Menu options are difficult to access and this is an area where I miss the top pull-down menus available on the Treo 650 most.  Finally, it is also rather painful to quickly view Tasks by Categories as this again requires an un-intuitive Menu access.

Overall I believe that if you’re a ‘power’ Tasks user you will unfortunately find the solution offered on the Treo 700w to be somewhat inadequate but it should prove OK for a light user.  However, considering that the Treo 700w is squarely targeted at the corporate market I would have liked to have more and better functionalities in place.

6. Notes (Worse)

Aside from the fact that the Notes application suffers from the same quick access drawbacks that I mentioned in Tasks, the first time that I started Notes I was left puzzled wondering “What the hell happened here?!”. 

I use Notes regularly on my Treo 650 (called Memos) and find it excellent for quickly jotting down various thoughts but unfortunately I found that what I got on the Treo 700w was next to useless in comparison.

For starters, accessing my notes was extremely slow – presumably because I have a couple of hundreds in dozens of categories.  Then, instead of a single unencumbered line per note found on the Treo 650 I was presented with an almost undecipherable list (below left) which includes the date and size of the note but _again_ does not have the customization option to not view these additional details. 

Also, again no option to Edit using the Press + Hold 5Way (above right) but there is nonetheless the very useful added convenience of Send via E-mail.

While I find the ‘front-end’ of Notes to be nothing short of appalling, the ‘back-end’ functionality is nevertheless quite impressive but not always easy to use.  Each note on the Treo 700w has the option to add drawings and also attach voice memos.  Alternatively, with the ‘View Recording Toolbar’ selected in the list view you can also quickly add a standalone voice memo.

Overall though, I find it extremely surprising that the company (Microsoft) which develops Outlook could not manage to create a program that integrates well and seamlessly with Notes on the Windows Mobile powered Treo 700w…

UPDATE: The Treo 700w is now available to purchase from the Treonauts Shop for only $299.00 (after mail-in rebate and 2 years new voice & data account).

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