Design
If you're a fan of existing Palm Treo models -- and the company has been somewhat slow to update the line locally -- then the first thing you'll notice about the Treo 680 is its sleeker style. There's no sign of an external antennae, and at 113 by 59 by 21mm it's among the smaller smartphones we've seen to feature a full QWERTY keyboard. The 680's display is a 320 by 320 pixel TFT touchscreen, which sits above the keyboard, dialling buttons and a set of function keys for accessing common phone tasks such as contact book, messages and of course dialling. In between these is a four way selector with a central selector button. The top of the Treo 680 houses a simple mute switch, while the sides are where you'll find the ringer volume, a customisable button and the SD card slot. The rear of the 680 hides a VGA camera, a tiny reflective mirror and the Treo 680's speaker.

Palm unveiled coloured Treo 680s (copper, arctic and crimson) in overseas markets, but only the traditional-looking graphite model will be sold initially in Australia.

Features
The Treo 680 is a Quad-band GSM (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) phone running Palm OS 5.4.9 for its smartphone applications. It supports Bluetooth, but only the older 1.2 standard, and Wi-Fi support is not provided. The camera on the rear is a plain VGA model. The Treo 680 has 64MB of onboard memory available for storage; given the usually slim nature of Palm applications that's quite good, although anyone wanting to use the onboard video or audio playback capabilities of the Treo will undoubtedly need to invest in an SD card to slot in the side. It's somewhat refreshing to see a phone in this size use actual SD and not any of the smaller (and more costly) variants -- it means that it's child's play to simply switch cards from many digital cameras straight into the Treo 680.

While classic Palm users will be very familiar with the interface that hits you when you press the home button, the Treo 680 also offers a five-tabbed interface that covers all the main bases of a smartphone without needing to flick through unwanted applications to get to them.

E-mail is enhanced with Versamail 3.5, which Palm says is more stable than previous versions and which synchronises your inbox, calendar and contacts through Exchange ActiveSync. BlackBerry Connect will be made available for push e-mail at a later date, but it's not certain when it will be released.

The Web browser Blazer 4.5 is pre-installed, which Palm claims is faster due to different caching rules and alternate viewing modes for Web pages. No third party applications are needed for video streaming and audio buffering, with the latter allowing you to listen to podcasts as they are downloading.

Performance
The Treo 680 is rated for up to four hours talk time and up to 300 hours on standby. In our moderately heavy testing we managed around eight days before the battery conked out on us, which is a little under the specified rating. We don't normally comment on audio quality for phones that much here at CNET.com.au, largely because it's such a varied thing depending on a host of network factors, but the Treo 680 annoyed us, simply because for absolutely every phone call we had, the voice quality was awful, and a quick SIM-switch to a couple of different phones gave us strong concern that it was indeed the T680 at fault, and not our network/position that was making it hard to hear calls -- if at all. That's still a factor that could just be within our test parameters, however.

The Treo 680's performance as a smartphone was solid but largely unexciting. The keyboard may feature a full QWERTY keyboard, but there's not really enough space inbetween individual keys, which led us to many typing mistakes -- we quickly worked out that we could type much faster and with greater accuracy with the Blackberry Pearl than the Treo 680, even though the Pearl doesn't have a full keyboard. Applications launched from within the Treo 680 interface ran well, but generally on the slower side compared to the existing pack of smartphones at this price point.

Existing Palm users who love the interface will find plenty to favour in the Treo 680's updated looks and simple tabbed interface, and for them the 680 is a good purchase option. If you're interested in the wider field of Windows Smartphones and RIM Blackberry phones, however, it lags behind the pack in several areas, especially the omission of WiFi and the plainly awful integrated camera.

CNET.com.au's Jeremy Roche contributed to this review.