Kirby- You need to analyze your needs for a PDA/Phone.
Background- While at CES Scott and I were comparing notes on this ? At first I was all hot on the 700w and so was he. But while Scott was busy with the satellite end of the show, I spent much of my day picking the brains of Microsoft Mobile and engineers with Palm. I had enough hands on experience with the 700w to determine what type of user would be happy with the 700w. Scott informed me his wife bought one for him, I suppose as a welcome home gift.
Abnyway, I had the awful task of having to break the bad news to him about the 700w, that it was just not stable with lots of apps running. But the good news was, I had located a PDA phone that seemed to have the best of everything we were looking for.
So heres the cut to the chase-
If you are a businessman user of a PDA phone and will use it primarily for data and phone communications, use the Palm included aps and don't plan to add any 3rd party software, then the 700w will probably be the best thing out there. People I have met including my wife who has the 700w, are thrilled with it and it's ability to keep them connected while on the road. It works well with Exchange server (Verizon) because Verizon has addressed the problem areas of push e-mail with a relay server for send out when IT's of some companies have those E server features disabled. I don't know whether other companies have resolved this or not but Verison has. It just took me a couple of weeks to figure it all out. Anyway, the 700w is quite stable for my wife's use as Palm designed it.
If you are a power user, need to play with all sorts of 3rd party aps and need many other functions like GoTop My PC, GPS mapping software, run video and multimedia, need to run Flash and java aps run other browsers and lots of games, and need to store lots of system memory required stuff. then the 700w will drive you up a tree 'oh!'
Stay away from it. eg. the memory from a cold start on my XV6700 is 24 Mb while the Treo700w is 11. Launch a few aps like your e-mail and a web browser and take a phone call and you are at 4 Mb on the Treo which is too low to send a reply without going into the system settings and manually stopping all aps, and/or rebooting to do a memory recovery. On the XV6700 you can do that, Plus launch media player be listening to some MP3's read Egress RSS agregator of news stuff all while e-mail is being polled every few minutes and answer a phone call with BT, run wifi and phone at the same time downloading a 70 Mb podcast. I have yet to run enough aps that require me to need to reboot. The only time I do reboot is when my Sprite backup program backs up the system every day at 4 AM. So whats the downside of this that the Treo lovers love- I think its ergonomics. form factor. Palm went to great lengths to make their PDA single handed operation for business user who just want to appear high tech and still appear business like. People like Scott and myself USE the pdas for so much stuff we appear more like a propeller head than a business person.
Also, we need the larger slide out keypad as the Treo keypad is too tiny, at least for me. But Palm has a nice feature in that they allow you to set yp canned responses to e-mail that you can send while talking on the phone to another person if you don't want to conference the calls or use call waiting.
The treo doesn't have wifi but you can buy a wifi SD card, butnthen you really can't download much because you have limited storage memory too. Forget about trying to download any file bigger that 30 Mb. Can't do! With the XV6700, I have already downloaded a 30 minutes TV show at 360Mb! (I have a 2 Gb mini SD card)
The argument for GSM, I think has to do with where you need to use the phone. If you travel world wide often, then you need it. I travel in the US so I discovered, the most reliabble connectivity whereever I've been so far has been Verizon. T-Mobile suffers, In my experience about a 30% dropped phone call rate or no service. Ok if you stay in the city and on the interstate but off that track and it doesn't work. GSM? don't need it because I'm not in Europe.
You mentioned processor speed- The Treo has been overclocked to 600 Mhz but the stability suffers. The XV6700 seems to be stable at 500Mhz too. I haven't talked to anyone who has tested stability of the Treo at 500 Mhz. The real issue with Treo is just use it stock and you'll be happy. Need to do more? get something else and give up that Treo Businessman's look.
