Monday, April 10, 2006
Palm's Treo 700w Reviewed: Part 1 (Intro, Background, Hardware)
Posted by Janak Parekh in "HARDWARE" @ 12:30 PM
Tour of the device, continued
Figure 22: The left side of the Treo 700w.
As figure 22 shows, there's two buttons on the left side of the device: an up/down button (they're not independent) for volume control, and a "Hold Side" button. The up/down button behaves the same way as every other WM5 Phone Edition device and cannot be remapped; however, the Hold Side button is different. I call it Hold Side, as opposed to Side, because while you can customize it in the Buttons applet, it only works if you press and hold the button for 2 seconds. This design decision, I'm sure, is to prevent inadvertent button-pressing. As I've ended up turning off that button's functionality on other Phone Edition devices due to inadvertent presses, this change is welcome.
Figure 23: Button applet on the 700w. A subset of keys shown, including the Option+OK and Hold Side. (The latter defaults to Windows Media Player; I've remapped it to a free screenshot program.) Mappable buttons also include Start, OK, Option+Send and Option+Start.
Figure 24: The right side of the Treo 700w. Not much to say here, but I took the picture, so why not show it. ;)
Figure 25: The top of the Treo 700w. Yes, the paint is chipping off on the "dark speaker" icon. :(
The top of the device is much more interesting than the right side. You can more clearly notice the earpiece "bump". There's the antenna on the left: yes, it's an external antenna, but I'm used to it and hardly notice it. It's not particularly long, either; Samsung's i700 and i600 antennas were noticeably longer and more annoying. Immediately to the right of the antenna is the SD slot: yes, a real SD slot (thank you, Palm! Boo, HTC!) and an IR port.