Handspring Treo 600 review from United Kingdom

Recently, I've started to notice interference during voice calls.

When it came out, this was the best smartphone available, and it's still an impressive device. I had a P800 before this, but the P800 felt like a beta release compared to the Treo.

Voice quality isn't great, but at least it looks like you're using a phone, rather than holding a PDA to the side of your head.

Battery life is stunning. With relatively light use, I can go a week between charges. The only downside of this, is that the battery is rather slow to charge.

The screen is very bright - prepare to be blinded if you use it at night. It does come in handy as an emergency torch though.

As an organiser, it works very well. It's hardly state of the art (160x160 screen, Palm OS 5), but the basic palm applications still work very well. If they're not powerful enough for you, plenty of third party alternatives exist.

The e-mail client is rather basic. No support for IMAP or downloading headers only. I bought Snappermail as a replacement, which works wonderfully.

The mini keyboard is a revelation. It makes the phone very usable without need for the stylus. The control pad also works well. Text messaging with this phone is a revelation - the built in messaging application threads your conversations like most instant messenger programs. This, combined with the keyboard, means you'll never go back to a normal predictive phone again.

The phone takes SD cards to upgrade its storage. This is very useful, but it's very easy to accidently press down the SD card when you put in in your pocket, which causes the SD card to pop out of the phone.

The camera on the Treo 600 is rather basic. It's OK for quick snaps in good light, but it's not going to take anything you'd want to keep, and it's pretty much useless in poor light.

You can play MP3s on the Treo 600, but you need a special adaptor to use a 3.5mm headphone in its 2.5mm socket. And most adaptors don't fit, so you have to buy the specific Treo one. They should have bundled it free with the phone.

Web access is through the Treo is not bad. The low resolution means that you're not going to be casually surfing, but it's great to be able to do a quick web search on the move.

One significant annoyance is the lack of WiFi support, even via additonal SD cards.

There are some great programs you can load onto the Treo. My favourites are as follows:

Avantgo - the New York Times and the Guardian in my pocket. Great for keeping me up to speed with the news.

Tomeraider - this allows me to browse a copy of Wikipedia on my SD card. Fantastic to have a full encyclopedia on my phone.