Design

The Palm Treo 500v is one of the thinnest and most lightweight Treo devices to date. At 110 x 62 x 17mm and weighing it at a 120g, the Treo 500v would fit nicely in almost everyone's hands without being too bulky, as usually the case with handheld devices with a full keyboard.  It is a little more wider than the Treo 750 but now so wide that it won't fit into the palm of your hand nicely.  Of course this would vary from individual to individual but for me the Treo 500v had a nice heft and feel to it.

The design of the Treo 500v is pretty simple and sleek. Its rounded shape makes it look different than most typical Palms and I actually liked its design. Build quality wise, you'll immediately notice that the Treo 500v is made of plastic though there isn't much bending or flexing from it and if feel quite solidly built.

Button placements on the Treo 500v was also pretty intuitive and simple, with the typical Treo buttons for volume and a side key on its side and a single power button that also acts as a quick list function button for setting sound settings and other frequently used phone functions (Bluetooth or flight mode). Function and call buttons are pretty generous in size while the QWERTY keyboard, while kind of small, was still pretty easy and to use even for a person with big thumbs like me.  At the bottom of the phone lies the 2.5mm socket for the headset and the mini-USB for charging and syncing. And if you're one of those people you like to hang your phone around your neck or even hang those weird lanyards on your phone, Palm has included loophole to allow the use of these things though it'll require you to use the battery cover to secure the lanyards.

Performance

The Treo 500v comes loaded with Windows Mobile 6 standard edition which means unlike the past Palm devices, the Treo 500v is not touchscreen based. I found this development from Palm pretty interesting since till now, all their devices were touchscreen which made the Treo 500v unique.  The device runs on a 400 MHz PXA270 processor which ought to have made the device quite responsive. Overall the responsiveness of the Treo 500v was pretty good though I believe (considering the processor) that it could have been much better. There were certain times when it became real laggy. This however I managed to fix by closing all the programs previously opened clearing up the memory thus making it respond faster in subsequent usages. As for storage, the Treo 500v comes with 256MB of memory with a 150MB of space for storage. Should you need more there is always the option of getting a bigger capacity micro-SD card.

I'm not exactly a big fan of the Windows Mobile operating system in whatever form, but I found that WM6 with the Treo 500v was pretty easy to use. Memory hogging aside, the interface of WM6 SE combined with the well planned interface buttons of the Treo 500v made the phone easy and quite enjoyable to use. Of course most normal Palm user might feel that it's a bit weird using a Palm device with no touch screen capabilities but I found that the shortcut keys available in the system more than made up for it. It also beats having an extra accessory that you have to use just to use the phone.

One complaint I have about WM6 though is it inability to copy and paste, which is pretty ridiculous for a Windows based device. I mean what is a Windows device without the ability to copy and paste. However other than that, interface wise I didn't really find much to complain about WM6 SE on the Treo 500v.

As for battery life, I was pretty impressed with the Treo 500v. With a 1200mAh battery, the phone was rated with a 10 day standby time. In my test though the phone didn't really hit the 10 day mark, it did have a pretty impressive 4 day battery life over normal usage.