Nov 12, 2003

The Sony Ericsson P900, the palmOne Handspring Treo 600 and the O2 XDA II are the talk of the town. So which is the best? TONY LIM plays with all three wireless gadgets to give the verdict.

Packed with features

It also comes with a whopping 128MB RAM and an additional 14MB usable read-only memory, which lets you store loads of games and contact lists. A Secure Digital expansion slot is available for addi-tional memory or a Wi-Fi card.

The Treo 600 is a Palm OS-based, quad-band phone, also with GPRS and MMS support. It has 32MB RAM with 24MB user-available and a SD slot for expansion.

The P900 is a Symbian-based tri-band phone, with GPRS and MMS support. It has 16MB of user-available memory plus a Memory Stick Duo slot for ex-pansion. A 32MB Memory Stick Duo is included in the standard package.

Compared to the other two gadgets, the XDA II is first a PDA, then a phone. It looks like a typical Pocket PC PDA, with six hardware buttons and a directional pad. It is sleeker now, thanks to the absence of a pro-truding antenna but it is still slightly bulky for a phone.

Some people may find it strange to hold the XDA to their ears to make calls because it looks like a PDA. The lack of a keypad and the size of the XDA II mean that it is hard to operate with one hand if you are on a crowded train, for example.

The P900 and Treo 600 are designed more like re-gular phones rather than phone/PDA combo devices.

The Treo 600 also puts the silver and metallic combination to good effect. It's too bad that Handspring (now bought by palmOne) decided to stick with an external antenna, which is a big minus on the cool factor.

Both devices are good-looking on the whole and will definitely appeal to the executive crowd. The design of the Treo 600, in particular, allows you to access all its functions with just one hand. The five-way navigational pad in the middle of the phone, just below the screen, makes it easy to navigate and make selections.

The P900's keypad is handy for basic functions such as making calls, writ-ing text messages via the short message service (SMS), looking up contacts and viewing the calendar. It also has a five-way jog dial button on the left side, which I found comfortable to use with the left hand.

Reviewer's comments: The winner here is the P900. Its conventional phone design is both good-looking and functional.

The magic is in the multimedia features

The XDA II, with its large screen, gives the best multimedia. Videos, music and games all played very well on this gadget. Its 400MHz Intel XScale processor handled the multimedia demands superbly.

The P900 also handles video and music files competently. Pictures and video can be viewed across the entire screen and in wide screen mode. Music played through the speaker was of acceptable quality.

Click on the thumbnail above for a full size view

The Treo 600 lags behind the other two devices owing to the absence of built-in software to play music and video. To do so, you have to buy additional software. The small, low-resolution and low-colour screen does not make the multimedia experience of the Treo 600 a great one.

Reviewer's comments: For the best multimedia experience, the XDA II is the way to go.

Wireless connection blasts off

Setting up all three units to go online via GPRS was a breeze with information provided by mobile operators. Getting on the Net was generally quick and straightforward. Surfing speeds did not vary much between the units and the surfing experience is satisfactory as far as wireless connections go.

Besides GPRS, the XDA II and P900 support Bluetooth and infrared (IR) connectivity, while the Treo 600 only has IR support.

With Bluetooth, you can hook up a wireless headset to the P900 and XDA II. When I tried it, voice qua-lity was loud and clear for both devices. File-transfers between the XDA II and P900 via Bluetooth were also fuss-free.

Reviewer's comments: In terms of breadth of con-nectivity options, both the P900 and the XDA II are commendable. No clear winner.

Pushing the right buttons count

The XDA II has no physical keypad. You input text using an on-screen virtual keyboard or via handwriting recognition. Both ways, you need a pair of hands to perform the task and it is not easy to do while walking or in a moving vehicle.

The Treo 600 packs 35 round and raised dome buttons in a Qwerty layout. Each button is about the size of a green bean and is closely packed together. While having a full key-board is nice, I found the small buttons rather diffi-cult to manipulate.

Heavy SMS users, with extended practice, might find it faster than using the conventional numeric keypad. But with the keyboard, the Treo 600 no longer supports handwrit-ing recognition as other Palm-based devices do.

The P900 has a flip numeric keypad like its predecessor, the P800. The buttons are now slightly smaller and flatter, which make them a little difficult to manipulate.

The keypad supports the T9 input method, but you can also input text using handwriting recognition or a virtual keyboard.

Reviewer's comments: The P900 is a clear winner here because you can use either the keypad or touch-screen display to input text.

Camera, lights, action

All three units are equipped with 0.3-megapixel, 640 x 480 pixels cameras. The P900 and XDA II are capable of taking still pictures and video clips, while the Treo 600 can only take still pictures.

With higher resolution screens and colour depth, the P900 and XDA II's pictures looked sharp on-screen. The Treo 600's pictures on-screen were poor, with highly dithered colours.

The P900 and XDA II camera settings can be configured for different lighting conditions. The XDA II also supports 2x zoom at lower picture resolutions. The Treo 600 has only automatic light balance, which did not work well several times, resulting in pictures having a blue tinge.

Reviewer's comments: When viewed on the desktop, images captured by the XDA II were generally the best among the three, making it the winner in this arena.

It has screen presence

The XDA II has the biggest and best screen among the three. Its screen is also one of the best I have seen on a Pocket PC device.

The screen of the P900, which supports 65,000 colours, is bright and crisp and is a vast improvement over the P800.

The Treo 600 is the most disappointing of the lot, with just 3,375-colour support at a low resolution of 160 x 160 pixels.

Reviewer's comments: The XDA II wins hands-down in this category with its screen size and clarity.

Powered to last

Battery life is one area that both the P900 and Treo 600 excelled over the XDA II. Both devices lasted about two to three days of average use before requiring a recharge.

In contrast, a fully charged battery for the XDA II needed a recharge after only one day. Heavy users might want to consider a second battery to avoid being caught with a 'dead' device.

The P900 and XDA II have replaceable batteries, while the Treo 600's battery is non-replaceable.

REVIEWER'S CHOICE

All three units are well-designed. If you are a heavy PDA user and want a 'talkative' PDA, then the XDA II is the clear choice. It has almost everything that you can ask for in a PDA-phone. However, if you want a smartphone, then both the P900 and the Treo 600 are equally capable of double duty as phone and PDA. Overall, the P900 (right) emerges the winner with its balanced combination of phone and PDA functions, excellent display, usability and form-factor. - Tony Lim.