The device also comes with a Pocket MSN client, setting up hotmail email accounts, and providing a mediocre built in MSN messenger client.

Email

The built in messaging application supports multiple Exchange, IMAP, and Pop email accounts. It is very fast, handles attachments well, and has a pleasing to use interface. It can check for messages at any interval.

Once you are in the app, gone is the simple clean interface of the Treo 650 to add smart text, emoticons, multimedia; everything is stuck within the right soft button menu. When you create a text message, you are using an email application hijacked for the SMS purpose.

For example, no longer does the SMS application thread messages into a chat; one of the most useful features of the Treo 650’s SMS application. Also, when you receive a message, every option except to read (to dismiss, to call the sender back) is put into the right soft key menu, instead of having its own button as on the Treo 650.

Without a doubt, text messaging have taken a step back on the Treo 700. Similar complaints can be made for MMS messages, the only major difference is that when one create an MMS message, one gets a custom MMS interface shoehorned into the email interface - which has parts better than the Treo 650.

Pocket MSN

The MSN Messenger client is full featured, and looks and acts just like the desktop version. It is not 5-way enabled (for example, you can’t scroll up a chat without a stylus), and has a nasty bug where in order the IM windows only takes up half of the screen at launch.

This is an application where Windows Mobile’s full reliance on soft key menus shows its weakness; the interface for managing multiple chats is poor compared to tabbed Palm OS instant messaging clients.

That said, the built in inclusion on the Treo makes instant messaging any of your msn friends incredibly easy, and will certainly become a time waster for many a Treo 700w user.

Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer on the Treo 700w provides a full web browsing experience in the same way that Blazer does on the Palm OS Treos, with similar capabilities to render HTML, frames, some CSS and javascript, and SSL.

At first glance, I was extremely disappointed with Internet Explorer. The default interface uses 1/3rd of the screen for various menu bars (standard start, URL bar, and soft key bars, along with thick scroll bars), leaving little room for webpage content. The default webpage rendering settings were poor; most web pages required side scrolling to view.

The entire interface, save the URL bar, and a back button, is implemented, like in many Pocket PC apps, through a long set of menus activated from the right hand soft key. No dedicated icons exist for things as simple as favorites or home.

Unlike Blazer on the Treo 650, to scroll down a page view, you must press option-down, as pressing down simply moves to the next link. For such a small device, I prefer the method that Blazer users; scrolling left and right moves link by link, and scrolling up and down moves the page up and down.

In general, I found that most web pages loaded in half of the time that they took on the Treo 650 on a 1xRTT Sprint Vision connection. When images, or files are downloaded, the speed is even greater. (Like 1xRTT, EVDO has high latency and fast burst speeds – so a big file will be much faster on EVDO than downloading of tens of small files where the speed advantage of EVDO will be mitigated by the long response time between the device and the server communicating). The speed of EVDO on Internet Explorer is one of the killer features of the Treo 700w.


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