Customer Reviews

palm Treo 680 Phone (AT&T, Phone Only, No Service)

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I bought this even though I saw a lot of negative reviews, some about battery life, some about dropped signals. So far I have had neither.

I have owned many Palm devices over the years and I will be the first one to say that Palm can make lemons, and when that happens they usually deny it until they come up with a patch much later, if they ever do. Not the most customer-oriented, quality-oriented company out there. But their OS is still the easiest to use in my mind, and with the myriad of apps out there you can make it do whatever you want, pretty much.

The screen is on the smallish side compared to the TX, but it's not that bad, especially for a phone. It's pretty reliable, and I have put a lot of my old software on it. The battery is what surprised me the most; I was expecting something really bad, but so far I have never been under 50%, and I am a heavy Palm user. I don't use the phone part of it much, just a call here and there, and I turn the phone function off at night. I also bought KBLightsOff, which turns off the keyboard lights unless you are using it, which probably helps a lot. So with these two settings, battery life is close to the TX in my opinion.

I have one dead pixel, but that can happen to any electronics manufacturer. I don't like the 2.5mm jack at the bottom of the device, that's a terrible place to put it. But with an adapter I can use my good headphones and sound is good. Get pTunes Deluxe so you can use subsription music like Napster or Yahoo Music. I should receive my 8GB SDHC card tomorrow, which will turn my Treo into an iPhone killer, IMHO. And for way less than $599...

Sound level is OK, and you can get software that boosts it up if you're deaf. Speaker level is LOUD! The SMS program is great, the phone app is great and fast.

So, overall, it's a great device. I wish Palm wouldn't charge an arm and a leg for accessories, but you don't have to buy from them...

If you want a phone that can do practically everything a laptop can do, you have come to the right place. The Treo can do email, play music, videos (e.g. full length movies), games, browse the web, schedule your appointments, etc. Add a 4GB or 8GB sd memory card, and you essentially have an iPod nano inside your phone.

The good : Rock solid - spurious resets/reboots or pauses that plauge other smartphones (incl windows mobile phones and earlier treo models) are gone with this phone. Excellent voice quality on both sides. Unlike the Blackjack and the Moto Q, you can read PDF files sent to you via email, and you can both read **and edit** MS Office files (word, excel). TONS of software, much of it free. Web browser does a very good job. PIM apps are excellent, just like a palm pda - easy to use, syncs w/ your desktop incl Outlook. Works great w/ Windows, Linux, or Mac desktops. Can hot-swap the battery w/o loss of data. Can install less-expensive high-capacity SD cards -vs- the Blackjack which wants microSD. This phone even works with the new 8GB Transcend SD card! PalmOS generally requies less effort to do basic things like add an appointment. GREAT sms features. Excellent user interface features make it very easy to use one-handed, unlike Windows Mobile. Excellent, bright 320x320 touch screen (touch screen is great for games, can work like a mouse for cut-n-paste in office apps, faster navigation). Solid bluetooth stack that works clear across the room. Easy to use the phone to access the internet w/ a laptop (DUN) via USB or bluetooth - Cingular doesn't charge anything extra to do this.

The bad: not a "3G" phone, so data speed is MUCH slower than phones like the Treo 700p or Samsung Blackjack. It goes about 120Kbs (on EDGE network). This does not matter much for email, since this phone can send/receive email "in the background" -- but this is not enough bandwidth to reliably watch live streaming TV for example. Camera resolution is only 640x480 ! (although it does a better job than most phone cameras, even indoors in low light). No built-in WiFi. Although the battery can get you through the day, and the battery life gets much better after the first few weeks (not conditioned properly at the factory?), this phone definitely needs to be re-charged every night esp if you get a lot of email. If you need a phone that can go 2+ days w/o a recharge or battery swap, look elsewhere.

I purchased the 680 as an upgrade to my 2-year old Treo 650. I wanted to get a smaller, lighter phone, with more horsepower. I tested many Blackberry units in store and some of them are really slick. In fact, the only reason why I did not go with a Blackberry is the Palm OS. After using the Palm OS for many, many years, I just couldn't get myself to switch to the "other side".

Anyway, I'm happy to report the 680 is a smaller, lighter, faster version of my 650. The interface has improved, menus are easier to navigate, and email has improved also. In regards to email, Verizon (my last provider) does not use "versamail". The lag time between getting an email on your server, and getting it to your handheld was 15 minutes or more. Now, with versamail, you instantly get mail to your handheld. Again, this is a huge improvement as far as I'm concerned. Occasionally, the phone will reboot itself. More than my 650 did, but start up is quick, and it hasn't posed a problem for me.

Here's the only (and BIG one) negative for me. Yes, you guessed it, the battery. With normal use you will not get a full day of battery life. Luckily for me, I spend most of my time in the office, or in a car, so it's not a huge negative for me. Figure on this, the battery will last you half of what you are used to with a 650,

Overall, I definitely recommend this phone to all.

*** UPDATE 9/11/07 ***

It seemed like my battery life was getting worse and worse. I could not make it through a full day, with only moderate usage, before it went dead. This now became an issue for me.

So, I started searching for ways to improve battery life. If I wasn't successful I would have to possibly move on to another phone. After ciphering through a lot of wasteful reading, I found the needle in the haystack...here it is:

"If you encounter a poor battery life on your Treo 680 and you have to recharge very often even if not using the Phone function, the issue might have been caused by an incorrect first charging of the device.
Please follow the steps below to solve the issue:

1. Connect your Treo to a wall charger.

2. Remove the battery from the Treo and wait for at least one minute.

3. Remove the SIM card from the device and wait for another minute.

4. Put the battery back into the device (without the SIM card) then let your Treo charge for at least 4 to 6 hours and for this duration:
o Do NOT press any key after reinserting the battery.
o Do NOT switch your TREO On or Off either, it will do so automatically after a short time.
o Do NOT enter the SIM card PIN if prompted to do so, just wait!

After you have done the above, you now need to make some changes with your settings. This is the final piece of the puzzle. Here's how to do them:


Go to Prefs > Power and:
* Turn "Beam Receive" OFF
* Set "Auto-off after" a 15 seconds
* Set your "Screen Brightness" to a medium setting (3 or 4 clicks under MAX or even less)
* Set "Dim backlight after" to 30 seconds
Other settings:
* Turn Bluetooth OFF if/when you are not using a wireless headset or other BT device
* Go to Prefs > Date & Time > Set "Automatically set" to "Nothing" (this makes a very significant difference in power usage
* You can use a software utility called KB LightsOff to turn off the keyboard lights of your Treo when they are not needed
* Also Phone Technician which will completely turn off your screen during a call to save even more battery life.

I am happy to report that the battery life of my phone has improved by 100% !!!!!!!! If you do all of the above you should get the same results as me...good luck!

I misplaced my (Verizon) Treo 650 and eventually gave up and decided to replace it after whinging about with my daughter's old LG. Since the rest of the family is on AT&T, I looked at the iPhone but went back to another Treo. (The iPhone user interface is superb, but I found the keyboard unusable for emails/memos/text messages, and I don't often listen to music or watch videos on my phone, so those otherwise great features were not of interest to me. And AT&T had a great rebate.) So I acquired a crimson treo...maybe I'll have a harder time losing it!

If you've owned a Treo, this has all the advantages of the family, using the Palm OS, which I prefer to Windows Mobile. If you've not owned a smart phone before, they are a tremendous productivity booster, and I can say from personal experience what a setback it is to return to a regular cell phone. The 680 synched up quickly with my laptop. (I followed the instructions and re-installed HotSync, assuming I would be re-entering a lot of names, but it saved everything from my lost Treo.) I use email from Earthlink and Yahoo as well as corporate Outlook and it works seamlessly.

(There was one problem with Outlook and my prior 650 - Versamail could not handle the it's-time-to-change-your-password message and woudl lock up. I don't know if it's going to be an issue with the 680 or not, but a password change on the 650 took care of the problem. YMMV.)

Battery life has been a common complaint of early 680 users. There are two factors here. First, the battery is smaller to help make the phone slimmer, and I like the new form factor. I regularly just plug it into the car charger and it's not an issue. The other factor is the firmware - before version 1.09, there were some battery-draining bugs in the 680. All the Treo forums I've researched have indicated that the May upgrade corrects most of the battery issues. There are now extended batteries available as well, although they require a different cover and make the phone larger.

I have not looked at all of the negative reviews, but I think that most of them will be from before May 2007, when the AT&T version of the upgrade became available. So I would suggest that readers consign these to the dustbin of history -- it's not a huge problem anymore.

There are a couple of drawbacks to the 680 for the 650 user besides the smaller battery. There is no Wi-Fi card available for the 680, which would be useful in the future. The SD card has been moved to the side from the top, which makes it harder to accidentally pop out the card. The 680 SD cover seems flimsy, but will probably be OK if one is careful to replace it correctly.

So...if you want a lighter weight Treo than a 650, and can manage to charge the battery daily, the 680 should meet your needs. I am ecstatic to have a Treo again, and the 680 has yet to disappoint me. Highly recommended.

PROS:
Crystal clear speaker (bye bye hissing noise)
Loud speaker phone and ringer
Great signal quality
Great integration with the PDA
Excellent Palm OS
OK camera
Nice keyboard

CONS:
Battery life

Perfect Smartphone!!! Both looks and over-all performance!!!

For those worried about the battery life - I think one of the most important things to do is properly condition the battery before use (or even after use, as in my case) ie. FULLY discharge and recharge at least twice (without using it in between). My phone performance (battery wise) seemed to improve remarkably after this. Trust me after conditioning your battery you'll not REGRET.

Unfortunately the conditioning of the battery is not mentioned anywhere and Palm should take complete responsibility for taking its consumers for granted.

Palm you can do a better job.

I bought this phone to replace a Treo 600. The 600 was a terrible phone. It had a buzz when used as a phone. This is a very good phone and great pda. There are hundreds of programs for it. I researched the 680 and the BlackJack. I have the Cingular 8125 as my work phone. I'm very pleased I went with the Treo. It is so much easier to use and can be used with one hand.

The windows phone I use at work requires the stylist to do most anything. You can easily use the keyboard on the 680 with one hand for text messages. There are a lot of programs for the Treo.

When I first got the phone it went into a constant loop after I tried to sync with my old Treo 600 software. Cingular wasn't much help. I got on Palm's website and went to the knowledge base found the problem and followed the easy instructions and I was back up and running.

The speakerphone is also good. I talked for 2 hours on it and the party I was talking told me it was very clear when I told her I was using the speakerphone and ask her how it sounded.

The only big negative I've found with the phone is the battery. I guess that is true with all the smart phones these days. The second negative would have to be the camera. It is improved over the 600, but still not near as good as most of the other camera phones. No more than I talk on the phone I can recharge it at night and I'm fine, but if someone talks all day long they should plan on having a second battery and charger.

Unless you need to watch streaming TV over the wireless network, need a better camera, or long battery life I think you will love the Treo 680. For Palm phone users you will like not having the antenna, but without getting it out of the old Treo cases is much harder.

This is a great pda, a very good phone, a fair camera, mp3 player and a pretty good video player. I bought some DVD software at palmgear and I slapped a DVD in my laptop and set the size I wanted it cut to for my SD card and created a movie. I loaded it on my SD card and it plays great on the 680.

This is a great device and for the money and would be very hard to beat. Where else can you get an mp3 player, video player, pda, phone and have hundreds of programs that are inexpensive to expand it's value? You can add a car navigation to that list if you buy the available bundle.

This is old Palm technology and very solid. For me it amazing to get so much for the price. The problems with the Treo 600 are fixed in this device. I much prefer it to my Windows based Cingular 8125.

It doesn't have the 3rd generation network of the Palm 700's, the Blackjack or Cingular 8525, but if you don't download alot of data or need streaming video, this should be the phone you compare everything else to.

I've had a Treo 650 for a long time. I wasn't 100% sure I'd want the 680, when it was first announced, but a big nasty scratch on my 650's screen helped me decide to take the plunge. I'm so glad I did. The lack of a protruding antenna makes it fit in my pocket much better, the internal slot for the SIM card eliminates my worry that it might get lost, and the covered SD card slot is very welcome, because the darned thing always popped out in my 650. The only thing lost from the 650 is the reset button. To reset the 680, you have to take out the battery. That's not a big deal, since even on the 650, you have to remove the battery cover to get to the reset switch. What's better on the 650? The main thing for me is that the cell phone's radio is slightly more sensitive and that it will take 8gb SD cards (SDHC). I use this phone for everything, since it's also a great Palm organizer. In addition to that, I've installed a registered version of Pocket Tunes, so it's a very good MP3 player. It's even compatible with PlaysForSure, if you're into that. That's why I'm so happy to see the 8gb support. I also use the phone to play games, like Monopoly and Scrabble, when I'm waiting on line or in a boring meeting. I have absolutely zero complaints about this phone.

The Pros: PDA, good mobile phone that really gets out, a camera for all those 'Kodak Moments', all packed in one for a good price
The Cons: You'll need to get a replacement longer life battery (Seidio makes one), and the browser (Blazer) has MANY problems.

I'm very happy with the purchase of this smartphone. I've wanted a TREO for a few years but could never justify spending big bucks for one. You can work around the problems with the unit with new battery and browser software, it's a nice little phone.

I haven't bought a memory card for it, so I can't report on the mp3 capabilities, but I am going in that direction. Somehow I don't think it will replace my iPod, but you never know.

This may be the first unhappy review I've written on Amazon...but here goes: I 'upgraded' to this phone recently from a Treo 650 that had speaker and audio problems (don't all Treo 650's suffer from that within a year's usage?). I loved my Treo 650 despite the well-known audio problems that arise, so I expected something equivalent to the 650 when I upgraded. But what I got was a 'smartphone' with quite a stupid battery life. I have decided that there is definitely some glitch in design (some online geeks suggest it might actually be the SIM card) that is causing power to run right out of the phone, in a sharp decline, even when its not in use and all possible extraneous functions are disabled and every "trick" Palm and other users suggest to extend battery performance is utilized. Add to this the fact that Palm's website's online user group is not active right now (so no users can visibly discuss this among themselves),and they have made it next to impossible to reach them to complain about this, you don't have to think too long to conclude that Palm knew this either beforehand or pretty quickly afterward, when they recently dumped this cheaper "smartphone" on the market recently. Sorry Palm, I loved you for the Treo 650 and was willing to live with some glitches, but a horrible battery life on the 680 is not something easy to tolerate. So all I can say is pretty "stupid" and wonder if this was your last hurrah before planning to exit the "smartphone" market? [Despite the prior reviews on this page that were so glowing, anyone who is doubtful of my complaint on battery life, or think that its isolated to just a defective phone here and there, I suggest that you please do a search on the internet before buying this phone, and read the numerous blogs out there on this very same complaint!)

P.S.: search under these words exactly on Amazon: "palm Treo 680 PDA Phone (Unlocked)" to read other reviews of this phone stating similar battery life complaints. Whether locked (meaning tied to any one company like Verizon or Cingular) or not, a Palm Treo 680 is still the same Palm product.

This is my 5th gen Treo as the Palm os and touchscreen make this the easiest and most intuitive Smartphone of choice.

No one at ATT or PALM seemed to be able to fix the quick battery drain, sometimes without any usage over 3 to 4 hours.

If you have the most current OEM Lithium Ion battery and have drained and recharged your phone three times and are still having short battery life, here are a few things you can do to fix the problem:

1. Make sure you have the latest software installed, version 1.09
2. see your manual or go to PALM to learn how to check your memory
3. Remove your battery and SIM card - wait for a couple of minutes
- replace the battery and plug in your ac adpter
- DO NOT TOUCH YOUR TREO FOR 4 to 6 HOURS
It is CRITICALLY important that you do NOT touch your TREO
- Replace the SIM card and battery
- Your phone will boot-up normally

You should have at least one day of stand-by and hours of talk time

Hope that this helps my fellow Treo 680 users.