So what did I get for my money? Out of its small, unassuming box (at those prices, you'd think they should line the container in velvet), the Treo 650 comes with a USB sync cable, a charger with some international plug adapters, a wired headset, a screen protector, a CD with the Palm installer and some software and...that's it. No slip case. No cradle. Even the manual is skimpy; it's thick only because it's printed in several languages. I felt miffed, but once I realized what I could do with the device, I almost forgot it didn't ship with a protective case.

Almost forgot, but not quite. If for nothing else, I wanted to protect my investment, so I shopped around Manila's computer shops and found third party Treo cases ranging from metal armor monstrosities to stodgy leather containers. I settled for a Pivot silicon skin case, a white plastic sheath which a friend said looked like a condom. What the hell, it's protection..

When I first handled the Treo 650 I thought its design would be identical to any other Palm PDA, but there are significant differences. The rechargeable battery's removeable. Powered-up it's supposed to provide six hours of talk time and 300 hours standby. I wouldn't know, I always recharge the smartphone at the end of the day.

The screen is 16-bit, 320 x 320 pixels (2.25 inches along each side), and might look tiny, but believe me it gets the job done. Not only is it crisp, it is also backlit. Unlike the Prism's display, the Treo's screen is visible under daylight. Just beneath its screen, the Treo 650 has six hard buttons, plus a central five-way button. It doesn't have the familiar silkscreened buttons of your typical Palm device. Also, where a Palm handheld would have a "To Do" and "Memo" buttons on the right side, the Treo has a "Messages/Email" and "Menu" buttons, apart from a power button. The Treo 650 also has two side buttons, one for volume, the other customizable. Most important, the Treo has a full and very small QWERTY keyboard. Looking at it, I initially wondered which of the Snow White dwarves it was meant to be used by, but actually the keyboard is ingeniously designed. The keys have been contoured such that you don't end up clumsily thumbing bunches of them at a time.

The ringer switch on top is a nifty touch: I can silence the gadget with just one stroke. No real estate has been wasted: the area of the antenna includes the SD card slot, SIM card tray, infrared port and stylus dock. All these, plus the removeable battery, constitute an elegant evolution of the design concept initially established by the Visorphone. A lot of thought clearly went into making sure the Treo 650 can be used with only one hand. It's so small that I tend to lose it in the clutter on my desk, which is when I usually start cursing Palm for not having shipped it with a cradle. Despite its small size and tiny buttons, the Treo 650 isn't hard to dial with your thumb. The directory is intelligent enough to try to guess whose number you're trying to dial when you key in the first three or four letters of the person's name.

Texting is something else, an owner will need two hands to manipulate the keyboard. What sucks is that Palm did away with Graffiti altogether -- the Treo has a stylus, but it's just for pointing at the touch screen. Fortunately for Graffiti addicts, it's possible to download a free hack that will restore Graffiti 2 functionality, so I've continued scribbling SMS instead of typing them. By the way, the Treo 650 gives you the option to arrange your SMS messages in a continuous "chat" that lets you keep track of your exchanges with whoever you happen to be texting.

The Treo 650 is a quad-band GSM phone, which means it's ready to be taken a-roaming round the world (assuming you're ready for the typically usurious charges). In several trips to Europe with the Treo, I never encountered the weirdness I experienced trying to use the dual-band Visorphone. It has no WiFi, so that's it for surfing in an airport lounge. But it has GPRS, which theoretically means I should be able to not only get "push" email through VersaMail, I should also be able to access the Internet using the built-in Blazer browser. Notice the "theoretically". I'm a Globe pre-paid user and I've had several discussions with their technical assistants, but all I can tell you is: if cleanliness is next to godliness, then Globe's GPRS Internet is next to useless.

MMS msg received. May I barf now?

At least the Globe MMS works, allowing me to send and receive pictures as well as video. I can tell you, there's no grander proof of high technology than that tingle you get when somebody sends you a digital picture of his open-heart surgery and follows it up with a photo of the heart in question.

Need to upchuck now? You can let the Treo 650 do it for you, with this nifty app that works with an SD card. I'm impressed by the sound the Treo can generate using this utility. I haven't tried it in a restaurant though. With a Treo 650 you'll have fun with MMS, producing and receiving images and movies all while walking down a street. Try not to get run down by a bus. They might have to pry your Treo from your cold, dead hand.

Because it's a three-in-one device, the Treo 650 isn't as beefy as a full-fledged PDA like the Tungsten or LifeDrive. But it still has an Intel PXA270 312 processor (by comparison, my Prism had a 33 MHz Dragonball chip). The Treo 650 doesn't pack that much free memory, only 22 MB, but it does use a gimmick called the Non Volatile File System (NVFS) to ensure that even if the power fails or the battery runs down, the tons of data I've stored won't evaporate. The downside is that as implemented, NVFS uses a lot of memory, so when I transferred the 8 MB of data from my Prism to the Treo 650, I found I hardly had any space left. Palm recently issued an OS updater that addresses this and restores the lost space, it's a bitch to install but it did give me back seven precious megabytes of space.

The Treo 650 runs Palm OS 5.4 -- no Cobalt for you, hijo -- which is more than enough to run the host of programs I tend to populate my handhelds with. There's no multitasking ability, though, and the device will only sychronize with Windows XP or 2000, and Mac OS 10.2 +. Apart from this, Palm dumbed down the Datebook, turning it into a cruder app called "Calendar", which doesn't allow floating events. And what happened to "World Clock"? It used to let you look at the time at four other cities -- now it's been reduced to two.