So we received our Treo 700W's today. It felt like Christmas as we all scrambled to rip open the boxes and start checking the phone out. The verdict is still out as to whether or not I like the 700W. The screen resolution, color depth, and clarity puts the Treo 600 to shame. It's about the same as the 650. The built-in camera will let you take 1280 x 1024 resolution pictures...which means you can actually use this as a camera if you wanted to. The camera on the 600 was a joke. The really fun stuff began when I pointed the IE browser to my.orb.com and logged into my HTPC box at home. I selected a Seinfeld episode and hit play...and I didn't expect really much to happen. To my astonishment, it started buffering for about 5 seconds and then...it streamed Seinfeld to my phone using Windows Media Player. The quality was actually quite good for being a phone. I have to break open the piggy bank soon and get a 2 GB SD card so that I can take my shows to go. When you put the display in full-screen mode, it's totally watchable. The sound is great too. Neither video nor sound had any jitters. My manager in Boise hit my Orb service and said that he was able to view the video, but it was pretty jittery. Boise won't have EVDO service until around November 2006, so they're going to have to wait before they get to experience streaming onto a cell phone up there.

All in all, I was quite impressed. It still takes a couple seconds for my brain to grok the Windows Mobile interface each time I want to do something. The phone quality itself is average, although the real test will happen tomorrow when I take it down to the datacenter and try making calls inside the cage. Usually what happens is that I lose my voice because I'm yelling so loudly, my battery quickly drains because the reception is so bad, and the receiving end gets frustrated and annoyed since all they hear is 8 million fans drowning out my cries. I don't think this phone will be much better, but here's hoping.