Palm Treo 755p (Verizon)

Despite its aged design, the 755p still looks good. The 2.3 by 4.4 by 0.8 inch (HWD) rubberized body is comfortable to hold in your hand and against your ear. The new Azure Green color flatters the design, though in most indoor lighting it appears grayish.

At 5.6 ounces, it could stand to lose about an ounce and a half of dead weight. But like the Treo 680, the 755p is still a bit slimmer than 2006 era Treos and lacks the hard plastic external antenna.

It includes a hardware ringer switch and a convenient, automatic keyboard lock two features that belong on every slab smart phone and it's simple to use one handed for basic tasks.

The handset's QWERTY keys are a little cramped compared with those of the Motorola Q9M and the Blackberry 8830.

But it heve always liked Treo keyboards, and found this one just as comfortable as the others. The Treo 755p's standard issue (for Palm OS) 320 by 320 screen is sharp and bright, and it's easy to navigate the OS with the stylus.

In fact, that's an understatement: RIM, Symbian, and Microsoft should all take another look at how well designed Palm OS is, because each one still misses the mark. Like all Treos, the 755p is a good voice phone. Test calls over Verizon's network were clear, loud, and distinct, with some minor reception issues outside.

It landed a particularly windy day for testing and the 755p held up well, although the other party could tell readily that it was outside and heard prominent wind noise. The 755p also sounded bright and punchy in both directions through a Plantronics Voyager 510 Bluetooth headset albeit with some intermittent dropouts in the connection. The speaker phone is tinny but loud enough to use outdoors.

The latest 755p is equipped with a 312-MHz Marvell processor, 128MB of RAM, and 60MB of free memory for user programs all good enough for fast performance. It runs the now four year old Palm OS 5.4.9 and has all the usual goodies, such as a robust built in organizer with a calendar, an address book, tasks, and memos.

Like all Palm OS Treos, the 755p is a good choice for Mac as well as Windows based PC users thanks to the Palm Desktop native OS X and Windows versions. For e-mail, the 755p hooks into POP and IMAP e-mail accounts using Versa Mail, which needs an update because it still can't display HTML messages or connect to some common Web-based e-mail services.

At least it connects to Exchange for Direct Push e-mail. For document editing, Palm builds in DataViz Documents To Go version 8, a killer office suite. But it's two ticks below the current release and lacks key features such as Office 2007 compatibility and support for tracked changes in Word.