Talk, Organise & Connect! (Handspring Treo 270)

Member Name: robomit

Product:	Handspring Treo 270
Date:	01/01/04 (241 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: - Excellent mobile phone interface, Backlit keyboard

Disadvantages: No expansion slot

The full-colour, flip-lid protected Treo 270's mission is a PDA-phone to help you talk, organise and connect. At least for me, the three seemingly disparate activities were generally executed in a highly streamlined fashion. The Treo 270 has a sharp, crisp LCD display, GPRS support and a back-lit keyboard helpful in poor lighting conditions.

Mobile Phone
The Treo 270 is a full-fledged mobile phone with features like one-touch speed-dialing, 3-way calls, call-waiting, call list and history management, vibration mode and amongst other features which can largely be managed from a provided 'handsfree' headset jack and the use of the Rocker switch or Jogdial -- as some Sony folks out there like to put it -- with push select for one-handed navigation. What is missing is a switch to lock the entire device from being accidentally turned on while it is in the pocket.

Web Browsing
The GPRS-capable 270 provides WAP access and displays in HTML but I have found that some pages which require extensive Javascript support are not rendered well on the provided Blazer web browser. I tried SMS but the lack of T9 predictive text was a minor inconvenience as I'm a pretty good typist.

Conclusion
The 270 is pretty responsive and energy-efficient. It takes quite a fair bit of use to drain the Treo 270's battery. The casing is also pretty sturdy and protects the display screen which is essential to prevent scratching. The Treo 270 is an excellent buy as my regular use of it attests that it is a competent mobile phone and more than average PDA that does deliver on the promise of Talk, Organise and Connect in one device although it lacks expansion capabilities of any sort.

Summary: