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Continuing from Part I, here are a few more notes I’ve made about various features of the Treo 650 smartphone:

• Camera: Yes, the Treo 650 has a camera. I’m not a big cameraphone user, but I suppose it’s there if I have any unexpected encounters with aliens or celebrities. It’s only 640 x 480 (VGA) resolution, which is good enough to take pictures to display on the Treo’s screen or maybe for a web page. The quality is decent for its size. The picture at left is cropped (unprocessed) from this VGA photo taken on the Treo. It can also take videos (320 x 240 with audio) and play them back on the screen. Getting photos from the Palm to a PC is easy—it syncs them automatically to the Media page in Palm Desktop, or you can use an SD card, email, or Bluetooth.
• Sync Cable: The included sync cable is pretty minimal. One end connects to the computer’s USB port, the other connects to the Treo. I would prefer a cradle, but I haven’t had any trouble syncing.
• PC Software: The big improvement I noticed in Palm Desktop is that Palm now offers their own software for syncing with Microsoft Outlook, rather than relying on PocketMirror. The new Outlook sync is much more reliable.
• Web browser: The Treo includes the latest Blazer browser, which is the best browser I’ve seen on a Palm device so far. It renders pages well, and you can choose to display them in a Palm-optimized mode or in an unoptimized mode that requires lots of horizontal scrolling, but matches the layout on a bigger screen pretty well. One caveat: for some reason, this browser is unable to access the Paypal website, which is unfortunately one I access frequently while travelling. I installed a third-party browser, xiino, which has no trouble with Paypal’s site.
• PCS Vision: Sprint’s data service, PCS Vision, is much better than the “Wireless Web” they used to offer. It’s consistently faster than T-Mobile, and available for a flat rate. The latency is much better too—with T-Mobile I had many long pauses while loading pages, and this rarely happens with Sprint.
• Dial-up Networking: Officially, the Sprint Treo 650 does not support dial-up networking (DUN) via Bluetooth, which means you can’t use it to get your laptop online. Sprint is supposed to be adding that feature with an update “relatively soon”, but in the meantime there’s a clever hack that enables DUN. It’s not perfect, but it works, and I can get my iBook online through Bluetooth. This has come in handy while camping and when my cable internet was down at home.

See Part I for more Treo 650 notes. I’ll combine both parts into a full review at The Gadgets Page soon.