Palm Treo 700w Video Review: Palm Meets Windows Mobile

In January 2006, Palm did something that caught a lot of its own longtime users off guard: it released a Treo that didn't run Palm OS. The Treo 700w, sold exclusively through Verizon Wireless, swapped Palm's own operating system for Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0 — a genuine turning point for a product line that had defined the Palm OS smartphone experience for years. Mobility Today covered the device early, publishing a video review not long after Palm showed it off at CES 2006. This article revisits what that original coverage can still tell us, what independently verified 2006-era sources confirm about the 700w itself, and where the two later, easily confused updates — a software feature pack and the Treo 700wx hardware revision — actually fit into the timeline.

The January 2006 Verizon Launch

The Treo 700w went on sale through Verizon Wireless on January 5, 2006, following an official Palm announcement the previous September. Contemporary coverage puts the price at $499.99 with a new two-year service agreement, dropping to roughly $399 after a mail-in rebate — with a considerably higher unsubsidized price for anyone buying without a contract. It was a Verizon exclusive at launch; there was no simultaneous version for other US carriers, a decision some contemporary commenters, including readers responding to Mobility Today's own coverage, felt limited the device's reach.

Palm's Surprise Move to Windows Mobile

The bigger story, though, wasn't the price — it was the operating system. Every earlier Treo that mattered to Palm's core audience, including the Treo 600 and Treo 650, ran Palm OS. The 700w was Palm's first Windows Mobile-powered Treo, built in partnership with Microsoft on Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC Phone Edition. For longtime Palm OS users, this was a real surprise, and not a small one — Palm OS had its own application ecosystem, its own interface conventions, and a loyal user base that had grown up with it. Windows Mobile meant something different: native compatibility with Microsoft's own software stack, more straightforward support for corporate IT departments already standardized on Microsoft Exchange, and a Pocket PC-style interface that Palm OS veterans would need to relearn. It didn't replace the Palm OS Treo line outright — Palm kept developing Palm OS models like the Treo 700p in parallel — but it marked the first time the company hedged its bets on its own operating system for its flagship smartphone line.

The Mobility Today Video Review

Mobility Today's video review lived at a page titled "Mobility Today Video Review - Palm Treo 700w," archived copies of which survive on the Wayback Machine starting January 17, 2006. What survives is narrower than a full review: a short video podcast, hosted as a downloadable .mp4/m4v file and distributed through Mobility Today's iTunes video feed, embedded via a QuickTime plugin at a 320x240 display size. The credited reviewer is David Ciccone, and the page's own text is direct about scope: "Today David Ciccone reviews the Palm Treo 700w. Palm debuts their first Windows Mobile Treo in which we go over all of the software and exterior characteristics of the phone." It explicitly defers one point — "I am very happy with the Treo 700w but will comment on the memory issue once I get an official statement from Palm" — and promises a more detailed written review the following week.

Based on reader comments preserved on the archived page, the video appears to have gone up on or shortly before Friday, January 13, 2006, with Ciccone noting he'd used the device "24/7 since CES" — meaning hands-on time at CES 2006 in Las Vegas ahead of the Verizon retail launch. The video's exact runtime isn't confirmable from the surviving page. What is confirmable, from the discussion beneath it, is the general tenor of the reaction: commenters and Ciccone himself repeatedly praised the device's speed ("ran smooth as silk," one reader wrote), its one-handed usability, and its screen clarity, while a real debate played out over available program memory and a soft-reset button relocated behind the battery cover — plus a lighter moment, referenced by a commenter, involving the stylus jamming during the demonstration. Ciccone wrote that it was, in his view, "by FAR the best Windows Mobile device I have ever owned," crediting Palm with delivering something he "would have never thought would happen."

What the surviving page doesn't let us confirm is a detailed, timestamped account of EV-DO testing, email and web-browsing walkthroughs, camera demonstration, battery observations, or call-quality notes from the video itself — those may have appeared there or in Ciccone's promised written follow-up, but neither is recoverable in enough detail to describe confidently here. Rather than invent that content, the sections below draw on independently verified, contemporary 2006-era coverage of the 700w's actual specifications and documented critical reception.

Hardware and Design

Underneath the software story, the 700w was a fairly conventional Treo physically. It used an Intel XScale PXA272 processor running at roughly 312MHz, 128MB of onboard non-volatile storage, built-in Bluetooth 1.2, and an SD/SDIO/MMC expansion slot for adding storage or accessories. The battery was a removable, rechargeable lithium-ion cell, rated at the time for roughly 4.7 hours of talk time and about 15 days of standby — figures reported in period coverage of the device rather than independently retested here.

The Physical Keyboard

Like every Treo before it, the 700w kept Palm's signature physical QWERTY keyboard beneath the screen, a design element that had become closely associated with the Treo brand and one of the main reasons the line had built such a loyal following among users who wanted real tactile keys rather than an on-screen keyboard alone.

The 240x240 Display Problem

Of all the specific criticisms leveled at the 700w in contemporary reviews, the screen resolution is the one that comes up most consistently. The 700w used a 2.5-inch, 16-bit color, 240x240-pixel TFT touchscreen — a genuine step down in pixel resolution from the Treo 650's 320x320 display, even though the physical screen size was comparable. This wasn't a minor nitpick; contemporary reviews and comparison coverage from the period flagged the lower resolution as a real, documented drawback, one that resurfaced repeatedly when the Palm OS-based Treo 700p arrived later in 2006 with the higher-resolution 320x320 screen intact.

The practical effect was straightforward: at 240x240, there were simply fewer pixels available to render text, web pages, and application interfaces. Text could appear coarser, web pages designed with more screen real estate in mind had less room to work with, and applications carried over from the Palm OS side of Palm's lineup, or ported from other Windows Mobile devices, didn't always make ideal use of the smaller pixel grid. It's a useful reminder that a lower spec-sheet number doesn't have to be dramatic to generate real, sustained criticism — a step down in resolution on an otherwise well-regarded device was enough to become one of the most frequently repeated complaints about the 700w.

EV-DO and Mobile Web Browsing

The 700w shipped with support for Verizon's EV-DO network, at the time the carrier's high-speed mobile data technology and a genuine step up from older, slower cellular data standards. Contemporary coverage of EV-DO devices from this general period commonly describes real-world speeds landing somewhere in the low hundreds of kilobits per second — figures that sound modest by any later broadband standard but were considered a meaningful, sometimes impressive leap for mobile devices in 2006. This article isn't attributing any specific EV-DO speed test numbers to Mobility Today's own coverage, since that level of detail isn't confirmable from the surviving archived page — the context above reflects general contemporary reporting on EV-DO performance during this era, not a claim about what Mobility Today itself measured.

The 1.3-Megapixel Camera

The 700w included a built-in 1.3-megapixel camera capable of roughly 1280x1024 still images along with basic digital zoom and video capture — respectable for a smartphone camera of the period, though well below what a dedicated point-and-shoot camera of the same era could produce.

Windows Mobile 5.0, Outlook, and Exchange

Running Windows Mobile 5.0 gave the 700w native versions of Outlook Mobile and other Office Mobile applications, along with straightforward synchronization against Microsoft Exchange Server environments already common in corporate IT departments. For businesses standardized on Microsoft's software stack, that native compatibility was a genuinely practical selling point — no need for third-party syncing software or workarounds that Palm OS devices sometimes required to talk cleanly to Exchange.

One-Handed Operation

Palm carried forward its long-running emphasis on one-handed usability into the 700w's interface, adapting the Windows Mobile shell with Treo-specific navigation and shortcut conventions rather than shipping a stock Pocket PC Phone Edition experience untouched. Reader reaction preserved in the Mobility Today comments specifically praised this aspect, describing genuine one-handed operation as one of the device's stronger points.

700w vs the Palm OS Treos

For anyone weighing a 700w against a Palm OS Treo like the 650 at the time, the tradeoffs were fairly clear-cut: the 700w offered Windows Mobile's application compatibility and native Exchange support along with EV-DO, at the cost of a lower-resolution screen and an unfamiliar interface for longtime Palm OS users. The Palm OS side of the lineup, meanwhile, kept its higher-resolution display and its established software library, but lacked native Windows Mobile compatibility. Neither side was a strictly better choice — it depended heavily on what software and workflow a given user was already invested in.

700w vs BlackBerry

The 700w also arrived into a market where BlackBerry devices were the dominant choice for corporate mobile email, particularly for organizations already running BlackBerry Enterprise Server. Contemporary comparisons from the period generally credited BlackBerry with a more mature, more tightly integrated enterprise email and security setup for organizations built around BES specifically, while crediting the 700w with broader general-purpose functionality — a camera, more flexible multimedia support, and a more phone-like, consumer-friendly feature set alongside its email capability. Neither device was universally declared the winner in this period's coverage; the more common framing was that the right choice depended on what infrastructure and priorities a given organization already had in place.

Battery Life and Call Quality

Beyond the manufacturer-reported battery figures cited earlier, this article isn't asserting specific independently tested battery life or call-quality results for the 700w — those kinds of hands-on measurements vary by network conditions, usage pattern, and testing methodology, and the surviving Mobility Today material doesn't preserve detailed figures on either front. Readers interested in period-specific hands-on battery and call-quality testing should consult full written reviews from 2006 directly.

700w vs 700wx: Don't Mix Up the Specs

This is one of the more common points of confusion in Treo history, and it's worth being precise about it. The Treo 700w and the Treo 700wx are two distinct devices, not two names for the same product. The original 700w launched on Verizon in January 2006. The 700wx followed later — released in September 2006, initially through Sprint before also reaching Verizon — and existed specifically to address one of the 700w's most-discussed limitations: available program memory, the exact issue Mobility Today's own video review had flagged as unresolved at launch. Both devices shared the same 128MB of onboard storage, but the 700wx doubled the RAM available for running programs.

The practical upshot: the memory complaints that show up so consistently in early 700w coverage, including in the Mobility Today comments discussed above, were a real, documented limitation of that specific device — and one Palm addressed directly with the 700wx roughly eight months later, not through a software patch to the original 700w.

The Messaging and Security Feature Pack Came Later

Direct-push email — automatic, real-time wireless synchronization of email, calendar, contacts, and tasks without manual or scheduled syncing — is often associated with Windows Mobile devices from this era, and it's a genuinely important capability. It is not, however, something the 700w had on day one. Microsoft's Messaging and Security Feature Pack for Windows Mobile 5.0, which introduced direct-push technology, was announced back in June 2005, well before the 700w even launched, but the update that actually brought this capability to the Treo 700w specifically was released April 20, 2006 — roughly three and a half months after the device first went on sale. Anyone reading about the 700w's messaging capabilities should keep that launch-versus-update distinction in mind: direct-push email was a meaningful upgrade the 700w received well into its life on the market, not a feature it shipped with.

Legacy

Looked at from today, the Treo 700w reads less like a single well-rounded product and more like a genuine inflection point for Palm — the moment the company that had spent years building Palm OS into its identity put out a flagship device running someone else's operating system instead. It shipped with real, well-documented shortcomings, most notably that 240x240 display and constrained program memory, both of which Palm and Microsoft addressed in different ways over the following months through the 700wx and the Messaging and Security Feature Pack update. But it also represented a real bet that corporate compatibility and Microsoft's software ecosystem mattered more to Palm's future than staying loyal to its own platform — a bet that shaped where the Treo line, and eventually Palm itself, went from there.

FAQ

What was the Palm Treo 700w?

A smartphone Palm launched exclusively on Verizon Wireless in January 2006, notable as the first Treo to run Microsoft Windows Mobile instead of Palm OS.

Did the Treo 700w run Palm OS?

No. It ran Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC Phone Edition, a genuine departure from earlier Treos like the 600 and 650, which ran Palm OS.

Why did Palm use Windows Mobile instead of Palm OS?

Windows Mobile offered native compatibility with Microsoft's software stack, including Outlook Mobile and Exchange synchronization, which appealed to corporate IT departments already standardized on Microsoft systems.

Did the Treo 700w support EV-DO?

Yes, it supported Verizon's EV-DO high-speed data network, which was considered a meaningful upgrade for mobile data speeds at the time.

What was the Treo 700w's screen resolution?

240x240 pixels on a 2.5-inch touchscreen — a lower resolution than the Palm OS Treo 650's 320x320 display, and a point of consistent criticism in contemporary reviews.

Did the Treo 700w have a touchscreen?

Yes, a 240x240 resistive touchscreen, used alongside its physical keyboard and five-way navigation control.

What is the difference between the Treo 700w and the Treo 700wx?

The 700wx, released in September 2006, doubled the program memory (RAM) available compared to the 700w, directly addressing one of the original device's most common complaints. Both share the same 128MB of storage and the same 240x240 display.

How much did the Treo 700w cost at launch?

Roughly $499.99 with a new two-year Verizon agreement, or around $399 after a mail-in rebate, based on contemporary launch coverage.

Which carrier sold the Treo 700w?

Verizon Wireless had it as an exclusive at launch in January 2006.

How did the Treo 700w compare to BlackBerry devices?

Contemporary coverage generally credited BlackBerry with tighter enterprise email integration for organizations running BlackBerry Enterprise Server, while the 700w offered broader general-purpose features like a camera and multimedia support. Neither was consistently declared the outright winner.