Palm Treo 650

Design
The Treo 650 is primarily made of plastic but has a overall solid feel. The front of the device houses the status LED, earpiece speaker, screen and the keyboard. Unlike previous palmOne handhelds, the status LED on the Treo 650 is quite functional and can indicate a number of different states as shown here. The edges and corners of the device are all smooth and slightly rounded. Below the display lies the central navigation ares with the application buttons and the 5-way navigator. The full qwerty thumboard lies below the screen completing the data centric smartphone design.

The right side of the device hides the infrequently used stylus silo, while the left has large volume rocker and a configurable application button, which was likely placed with a push to talk feature in mind. The bottom contains the new palmOne multi-connector and a smaller 2.5mm headset jack. The top of the device holds a rounded exposed antenna stub the SD card slot, SIM card bay (on GSM versions), the IR window and a convenient silent mode switch.

Phone & Wireless Specs
The GSM Treo has a quad band wireless radio that uses the 850/900/1800/1900 MHz frequencies. The CDMA model uses a digital dual-band CDMA/1xRTT radio operating on the 800/1900 MHz bands. The GSM model also support high speed EDGE networks with data speeds averaging up to 135 kilobits per second (kbps). It also features E911 compliance with a built in GPS chip that is solely used for the enhanced E911 emergency location service.

Bluetooth
In addition to its wireless phone network capabilities the Treo 650 has built in Bluetooth wireless. Bluetooth enables a number of new accessories including wireless headsets, bluetooth GPS, wireless hotsyncing etc. When enabled, with Bluetooth Dial up networking can use your Treo as a mobile modem taking advantage of its data connection to use on your laptop or PC. However, certain carriers have disabled Bluetooth DUN by default, but fortunately there are patches available to re-enable this feature.

Audio
The Treo 650 has a dual speaker design, with the front earpiece speaker used for phone calls only while the rear handles the sysytem sounds, games and music. If you want to listen to digital audio via a headset you'll need the 3.5mm stereo adapter. The rear speaker is well placed just under the camera and can be very loud. There is an excellent selection of ringtones that can also be used as alarms. (finally some new and modern alarm sounds!)

Battery
The Treo 650 comes with a 1900 mAH Li-ion rechargeable battery that can be removed via a cover on the back. Additional replacement batteries are sold by palmOne for $59.99 USD each. Battery life for GSM models is rated at 6 hours talk and 300 hours standby, while the CDMA version gets 5 hours of talk and 300 standby. Tapping on the small battery icon will tell you how much battery life is left percentage wise. With my own personal usage pattern, which included heavy internet usage and a few phone calls a day, I am able to charge up every 3-4 days or so, which is very impressive for a high end phone.
Display
The Treo 650 has a very sharp 16bit color, 320x320 pixel TFT screen, which measures just under 2 x 2 inches. palmOne outfitted the 650 with a high resolution screen in about the same spacial area as the Treo 600 making for a very crisp text and graphics experience. The fonts are extra smooth and photos and graphics look great. The screen also offers improved visibility in direct sunlight, though slightly washes out. There is a backlight slider which can also turn the backlight completely off.

Thumboard
The Treo 650 has a improved thumboard over the Treo 600. The keys are now slightly larger and flatter and are arranged in a curved smile pattern. This new design is much more ergonomic and makes thumb typing on the 650 a more effective and smoother experience than its predecessors. It also has an improved backlighting system for the keys. The keys glow a sharp white color that is especially bright at night and consistently well lit. One minor complaint is that there is no option to adjust or turn off the keyboard backlights and they always remain on when the device is in use.

Camera
The Treo 650 has a built in VGA camera with 640x480 (0.3 megapixel) resolution and automatic light balancing. It has 2x digital zoom and can also capture movie clips in the .3gp format. The camera's quality is vastly improved over the Treo 600's. Photo's are more realistic and colors and light balancing are much more accurate. Pictures can be automatically stored in configurable photo albums to either the handheld memory or preferably an SD card.

The rear of the Treo contains the VGA camera, with a small circle mirror for self portaits. Underneath the camera is a speaker-grill for the speakerphone and music playback. Next to that is the button to remove the battery door, which exposes the removable battery and reset hole, which can be triggered by the stylus tip.

Hardware
The 650 is powered by a 312 MHz Intel PXA270 processor and runs Palm OS Garnet v5.4.5. It has 32 Megabytes of non-volatile memory, of which 23.7MB is user accessible. The non-volatile memory allows the memory contents to be preserved even when the battery is removed or out of power. The Treo also incorporates a SD memory expansion slot which can accommodate MMC, SD and SDIO memory cards. However, it does not yet support the palmOne WiFi SD card at launch. palmOne claims to be evaluating the situation, so there is only a slight potential the card will eventually be supported.