[Bearxor]

I've had it since Friday. Here is a quick review I did on pdaphonehome.com in a thread...

When I wrote that last night, I've only had it for a day. I'm sure I'll come up with some more eventually but I'm sending the 6700 back tomorrow so my credit get applied. One thing I've noticed that I neglected to mention was that the screen on the 6700 seems kind of washed out compared to the 6700. Anyways, here it is:

My 6600 died a couple of weeks ago (Tuesday the 5th) and the Sprint store switched it with a 6700 (which I knew they would) and I lost my $10 Vision/Text plan (which I knew I would). At first I was kind of excited. I had to eventually call executive services to get some kind of decent deal for Vision/Text messaging. I was willing to pay double what I was previously, and he offered me $10 Vision and 500 Text for free or unlimited text for $8. Since I did the AUTD at the time, I took the unlimited so the total was $18. Not to bad I suppose. I had to act all agrevated and upset that I had to triple my price because my phone broke and they don't make it anymore but that's all part of the game right...

So on to the story... Here I was with a new 6700 and EVDO service! Woo hoo! I was excited and began screwing around with it immediately. When I moved in to a new apartment in May, I moved in to an apartment that barely picked up service. The 6700 was just as bad. It had WiFi so at least I could use it in my house.

My experience with the phone was really crappy. My first call on the device was to executive services. This was fresh out of the box with no programs installed other than what comes with it. He put me on hold to see what he could do for me and then my wife came home, so I put the phone on mute to say hi to her and such. When he came back on the line I pressed the unmute button. It took almost a minute for the phone to unmute, it was crazy. The phone is all right after a soft reset but once you run a program or two on it, it slows to a crawl almost. The screen rotation takes forever. At the highest volume level can't be heard unless I was in a library. Tuesday morning I looked at it and the screen had turned solid white. Soft reset, hard reset and pulling the battery for several hours did nothing.

Needless to say, I was not very impressed with it. Tuesday night I was surfing around planning my trip to the Sprint store the next day and I started reading about the Treo 700wx. Based largely on Malatesta's experience, I decided I would ask for a Treo 700wx the next day. Needless to say, it didn't go over well. In fact, the Sprint employee acted like I insulted his mom or something when I mentioned how bad the 6700 was. He said he had never heard of anyone going from a 6700 to a Treo and to be honest I used to agree with him. I used to get that sniveling look when someone out in public would ask me 'Is that a Treo?' and I would snivel at them and say 'No, it's a PocketPC phone!'. I took the replacement 6700 called up the guy at executive services that gave me the deal for Vision and Text and asked him if he would do it. I told him it was the worst PocketPC phone I had ever used. I thought about the statement a while after making it and wondered if it was true. Was the 6700 worse than my old 2032SP? I later decided yes, because at least when I recieved a phone call on the 2032SP, I could hear the person on the other end. He said yes and the next day morning I had my new Treo 700wx.

I hadn't planned on activating the 700wx right away adn wanted to give myself the weekend to play around with it. Within a couple of hours I had made the switch.

Let me say this in plain terms so that no one is confused:
ANYONE WHO SAYS THAT THE TREO 700WX IS LESS OF A PDA THAN THE 6700 IS JUST A COMPLETELY BIASED FANBOY

Let's just look at the differences on paper. The 6700 has a 416mhz processor compared to the 700wx 312mhz. The 6700 has integrated WiFi. The 6700 has a 2.8" 240x320 screen and the 700wx has a 2.5" 240x240 screen. Other than that, there are no other technical differences, although there may be preference differences.

Lets' tackle these, shall we?

1) The Treo 700wx has no integrated WiFi - Initially, I thought this was a major negative. Since I had moved to a poor service area, I had started using WiFi a lot more on my 6600 and I used it pretty heavily on the 6700. The good news was I have the E300 SDIO card. The good news is, the Treo frickin rocks with a WiFi card. You pop it in, wait about five seconds and if your network is already configured, it connects. No soft reset required. I had problems at first because I thought I should have just plugged it in and it would work and you need to actually install drivers first. After that, it just works. I also had a problem with the WiFi on the 6700. It dropped in various places in my house, and the E300 seems to have a stronger signal than the 6700 did.
2) The Treo's 240x240 screen - I was awful leery of this to begin with. Having been able to play around now the only times I've missed a higher resolution is on my Today screen, and the fact that I can't play Cubicle Chaos anymore. For people who are used to a 240x320 screen it's hard for me to verbalize how much of a non-issue this is. I hear some people use GPS and need the extra screen real estate. I've never used any kind of GPS program so I'm ignorant in that area.
3) The Treo has a slower processor - This is a biggie too, but is completey irrelevant. Someone on another forum said it and I can't remember where but the quote was something along the lines of how it feels like HTC just kind of threw in a WM5 install CD and then added some programs to it whereas Palm took out the parts of WM5 they didn't like and added their own stuff in the ROM. The speed of the device reflects this. I just did a small test with my 6700. 47 seconds to soft reset. This is with nothing installed. I've already hard reset it to send it back. The Treo boots in 32 seconds. Even though it's technically a slower device, the OS is far more optimized and responds quite quickly to anything you throw at it.

The biggest cons for the 700wx that I can think of are that there is only one real customizable hardware button and it's a press and hold button instead of just a press. Of course I assigned it to Voice Command. I'm getting very profficient at using the keyboard shortcuts though. Windows key then I for Internet Explorer, S for settings, etc, etc... The keyboard is definitely worse than the 6700 but thats a sacrifice you make for not having to turn the damn thing sideways. I'm also going to miss a flash. I used it as a flashlight ALOT. One more irritation is that when you hold down the center key to do something, it doesn't draw the little circle so you never know if it's working or not until the menu pops up. When you tap and hold it does work properly.

The Pros for the 700wx: Voice Command is included. Sprite Backup is included. SD instead of MiniSD. Hardware silence switch. LOUD Speakerphone. Extended battery fits inside the stock cover and adds no extra bulk. A real 5-way nav pad. The little joystick on the 6700 looks cool and all, but after some extended use, it really hurt my thumb, so I'm glad to go back to a more traditional nav pad. The keyguard is the traditional Treo keyguard, press power to turn on and the center key to unlock. The 6700's keylock is a real PITA. A battery meter that counts down in single increments, WTF every other PPC phone I had did that... Readily available accessories in most cellular stores.

Major Pro for the 6700: More memory. I copied a couple of files to the 6700 and it was throwing up 'Not enough memory' warnings. I've installed a ton of programs on the 700wx and still have room to breathe. Not only does the 700wx have more storage memory than the 6700, an extra 23MB. But get this... Out of the box, after a hard reset, the 6700 only has 29MB available to the user. That is of course, after the Extended ROM installs. I'm not doing a hard reset on my Treo to see but after a soft reset, with a couple of my programs installed and a few files stored in my documents, I have 35MB still available. That's more than the 6700 fresh out of the box. On a hard reset on the 6700, there is a total of 49MB of program memory, where the Treo has 57MB, 8MB more available. On a soft reset, the Treo and the 6700 use about the same amount of program memory, 16MB, so the Treo still has more program memory available to it by default.

The biggest gripe, the absolute biggest gripe I have is just how friggin cheap the package is. You get a phone, a battery, a charger, a sync cable, a adapter to use Sprint's standard charger and a headset. Having owned every other PPC phone previously, I'm used to getting a cradle and at least some way of carrying the phone around. It may not be the best, but at least give us something to put the phone in before we are able to order something better.

In the end, I can't believe I'm going to say it but I prefer the damn Treo 100 times more than I do the 6700, and it doesn't look like there's anything coming out anytime soon that yells 'BUY ME!!!'. I guess I'll wait for a VGA device that will eventually come.

It's sad that HTC, with years of WM deveolopment has not produced a phone that compares to the Treo 700wx, Palm's first WM-based outing. Some things should just be common sense. A hardware silence switch? It should be standard. Damn, even the G1000 had something similar. Hold down the OK key to quickly get to the memory app to close programs? Why didn't HTC think of that? HTC makes awesome hardware, no doubt, but they really need to hire some programmers to customize and tweak WM in the same way that Palm does. While on paper, the 6700 should win with no contest but in reality, the 700wx is faster, easier to use and comes with more memory.

EDIT: I just remembered that fresh out of the box, a 700wx has about 60MB of storage space available to the user. That's twice as much as the 6700's 29MB, even if you don't install the extended rom, it's still more.