The guy who first reviewed the Treo 700w for Personal Tech Pipeline wrote a glowing recommendation for Palm's first Windows device. He liked it so much, he bought one. Now, after three months, he points out the gadget's many flaws.

Now for the "bad" and "ugly." Let's start with the "what-was-Palm-thinking" items. The unit may have 60 MB of memory available to the user, but only 24MB of that is available to run software (the rest is storage.) I've found that typically, with nothing run, I only really have around 4-6MB of available memory, and both I and other users have reported memory leak issues that require you to reset the phone occasionally to get even that. At least under Windows Mobile 2003 you could set how much memory you wanted to assign to programs and how much to storage, under WM5 you're stuck with the division Palm chose.

The 240x240 screen is also too small, especially since both the Treo 650 and rumored 700p have 320x320 screens. It's almost like Palm has deliberately crippled the 700w to make the PalmOS versions look better. Very few programs run flawlessly in the 240x240 footprint, although some vendors such as Mapopolis have made the effort to port their software. Prepare to be disappointed by the selection of software that runs without glitches.

But the real problem with the Treo 700w is the pitiful stability of the software. Many users (including I) have seen their units lock up and become totally unresponsive until reset. Even when running correctly, the phone can become sluggish and "go away" for a minute or more. Worse, even an incoming phone call won't wake up the Treo when it's in this state. I've lost quite a few calls because the phone went wonky.