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Palm's most advanced Palm OS handheld is the Treo 700p (see our review), which is offered by CDMA/EV-DO carriers Sprint and Verizon Wireless in the U.S. Since its release, many users have reported a number of bugs and performance issues with the smartphone.

These include, but are not exclusively limited to, problems with Bluetooth compatibility between the 700p and wireless headsets/carkits, resulting in dropped connections (or none at all) and compromised sound quality; stuttering music playback; and extensive lag times when switching between applications.

The folks over at the TreoCentral's forum community have been particularly vocal about these and other bugs surrounding the 700p. So much so, they banded together and wrote an open letter to Palm CEO Ed Colligan last month, beseeching the company to openly recognize and respond with a remedy to their complaints.

And respond is exactly what Palm has done, through a surprisingly detailed - and no doubt welcome - letter from the company’s Senior Product Manager for Palm OS Wireless Products Steve Sinclair.

After a long exposition explaining the ins and outs about and machinations behind how Palm responds to customer feedback and the process by which the company delivers updates to end-users, Sinclair takes each of the major 700p bugs on individually.

Suffice it to say, the Bluetooth and music playback problems will be addressed through a ROM update, which will also sport additional system stability, reliability and performance enhancements; but not until late in the first quarter of next year. Because the smartphone is used on a mobile operator's network however, a carrier must test and certify a patch before it is released to customers, said Sinclair.

The nature of the carrier/handset vendor relationship also affects what information gets communicated to Treo owners by Palm as well, contributing to the company's own internal struggle to decide what issues to flag internally or acknowledge publicly.

According to Sinclair, there's not a great deal Palm can do about the app switching problem, however. He said in the letter:

Aside from working with 3rd-party developers to minimize the lag while switching to/from their apps, there isn't much we can do to alleviate this as it is partly the result of the shared hardware design between the Treo 700p and Treo 700w/wx [Palm's Windows Mobile Treo models for CDMA/EV-DO carriers]. I don't want to sound like I'm dismissing the frustration this is causing power users, but it has not been reported by a significant portion of our customer base

While Sinclair goes on to assert that Palm still delivers faster performance in the Treo than other smartphones, he added the company is listening and will make improvements in this area with future devices.

For Sinclair's complete letter, click here.

More on Treo 700p
The 700p, Palm's first Palm OS Treo to support high-speed EV-DO cellular networking, includes a 312MHz Intel XScale processor, Palm OS 5.4.9, SD card slot, and 128 MB of non-volatile memory (60 MB available to the user), which will survive a complete power drain like all recent Palm devices, and is a vast improvement on the Treo 650's mere 23 MB of memory.

Palm's 700p measures 2.3 x 4.4 x 0.9 inches and weighs 6.4 ounces. It has the familiar QWERTY thumb-keyboard, a speakerphone, infrared port, ringer/silent switch, four application keys, and a 5-way navigator.

The camera (for picture and video) - a 1.3 megapixel type with a self portrait mirror - while still far lower resolution-wise than many other smartphone models from other vendors, is much improved over the 650's VGA model.

Since the 700p is a Palm device, and not a Pocket PC phone, like the 700w, Palm was able to bump the resolution of the display to 320 x 320 pixels, compared to the Windows Mobile model's 240 x 240 pixel screen. Microsoft's square resolutions are limited to that resolution or the higher 480 x 480, which no vendor has chosen to go to yet.

The 700p is the first Treo you can trickle charge (up to 500 milliamps) via the standard cable out of the box. It comes with a removable lithium ion battery.