Pleasure Doing Business With New Palm Treo

And matching software:

Customized home screen with search functions for contacts and nearby GPS landmarks

Office Mobile suite (Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote)

Microsoft Exchange mail (both push and pull)

Sprint Navigation (works with built-in GPS to provide voice-guided and on-screen turn-by-turn driving directions, 3-D moving maps and more than 10 million local listings and real-time traffic alerts with one-click rerouting.)

Pocket Express (customized Web content delivered to your phone)

Yahoo!(YHOO Quote) Messenger, AOL's AIM and MSN Messenger

Sprint TV (50 TV channels)

There's a miniSD memory card slot but no headphone jack. The 800w is designed primarily to do business. I'm happy to say that it does it well. I'm not thrilled with the micro-USB connector on the AC charger though. The slightly larger mini USB connector is much easier to use.

I was able to set up an Exchange mail account on the new Treo in less than five minutes.

Except for these preliminary tests, I know from experience that it isn't wise to leave the wireless mail service set to "push" my email to the device -- meaning that it was always receiving email. That kills battery life. So I set it to "pull" email every five minutes. That allowed me to stretch the 800w's battery life from a low of five hours (with "push" mail) to more than 36 hours (with "pull" service). That is a huge difference. That's a smart thing to do with any smartphone set to receive "push" Exchange mail.

Otherwise, all the functions I've had a chance to test seem to work as described. I did get to enjoy watching some programming on the Sprint TV service. Because the phone operates on the fast EV-DO data network, I was able to watch high-quality TV feeds on the 800w.

The IT manager here at TheStreet.com requires that any wireless email devices I want to test on his network have a remote kill feature. That means that if my smartphone is lost or stolen, that he can broadcast a signal that makes the phone unusable. The Palm 800w supports that feature -- and gets our IT seal of approval (at least on that count).