First off, although Treos come with music player software and use SD flash memory cards to allow flexible storage of music files, the headphone jack is inexplicably a 2.5 mm microplug rather than the standard 3.5 mm minijack used on virtually all player headphones. Palm will sell you an adapter for 10 bucks to let you use regular headphones.
Nuts to them.
If there was some technical reason requiring the odd-sized jack, on an item with a list price of $500 ($400 with a cell phone contract), they could bloody well have included the adapter as a standard feature. Head off to Radio Shack or any other electronics parts store where the adapter will cost you only three or four bucks.
On the other hand, given the lofty price, you can pretty much justify a high-end leather case. I have two suggestion: Argentina's Vaja and California-based Sena.
Vaja has the ultimate item: its i-Volution T7, priced at $94 (and higher if you add options). This series of cases (which also includes ones for the iPod) is a protective plastic shell wrapped in fine leather -- so you get both the protection of a hard case and the elegance of a leather one.
Vaja also makes a more lower priced case all-leather Treo in its Classic line (starting at $64). Sena makes a $40 clone of this called the LeatherSkin. It lacks some of the Vaja's touches (for example a simple open hole over the speaker instead of Vaja's mesh covering), but the price is attractive and the quality is good.
There are downsides to these designs, though. Unlike the i-Volution, they offer minimal protection from the dropsies and require a strip of leather below the screen to hold their shape, which interferes with the Treo's navigation wheel. Further, one annoying design feature of the Treo 700 is that the reset button is inside the battery compartment, which means to do a reset you have to take the Treo out of a case, open up the battery cover, then reverse the process -- and these tight skins can make that a chore.
You may do better, then, to leave your Treo "naked" and keep it in a horizontal or vertical pouch in standard cellphone style. Here Sena has the edge with pouches of both designs ($40 for the horizontal; $50 for vertical). And if you are totally indecisive, there's a $60 combo package of a horizontal pouch and a matching LeatherSkin.
Last item on the accessory list is for Mac users. Palm's software for syncing data between your computer and handheld (this applies to all Palms, not just the Treo) is fairly decent for Windows, especially if you use Microsoft Outlook to keep your contacts, calendars, and tasks. However, the Mac version is pretty lame.
A better choice is Mark/Space's Missing Sync software ($40 download; $50 on CD). It provides integration with iTunes and iPhoto to let you put music and pictures on your handheld -- plus it lets you get around Palm's limitations on multiple addresses and multiple emails for your contacts.
