Palm Treo 680 takes on the smartphone

 

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Posted on 13 Oct 2006 at 13:21

Palm has unveiled the new Treo 680 targeted at first-time smartphone buyers. The company believes that it will appeal to price-sensitive phone owners who want a more powerful mobile device.

The GSM/GPRS/EDGE quad-band world phone in four colours - crimson, copper, arctic and graphite - provides email, Web browsing, messaging, multimedia support, calendars and an address book out of the box. It runs Palm OS 5 on an Intel PXA270 312 MHz processor and has a 320x320 TFT colour screen and a full qwerty keyboard, plus an integrated MP3 player, digital camera, camcorder and video player.

The Treo 680 boasts a 'unique' phone user interface that provides that ability to respond to calls with a preset text message and to add new phone numbers to existing contact information. It also supports three-way calling and provides both SMS and MMS capabilities.

The smartphone has 64MB of user-available storage, plus another 2GB that can be added with MultiMediaCards or SD cards. Built-in Bluetooth 1.2 enables improved car-kit and headset support, support for multiple simultaneous Bluetooth connections and dial-up networking capabilities: the smartphone can be used as a wireless modem with any Bluetooth-enabled laptop.

The Blazer 4.5 Web browser has been improved with smarter caching rules and includes alternate modes for viewing Web pages optimised for handheld devices or standard pages. Documents To Go software is included for editing and sharing Word and Excel files, and viewing PDFs PowerPoint presentations.

The Treo 680 is compatible with both Mac OS X and Windows and its Exchange ActiveSync software will now synchronise email, calendars and contacts.

'The Treo 680 is the smartphone for everyone. It's small, sleek, fast and comes in a variety of fun colours,' said Ed Colligan, president and chief executive officer of Palm. 'It's a great phone design, great for messaging and email, and provides users easy and fast access to the Internet and to their favourite music and pictures, and makes it easy for people to manage and balance their business and personal lives while on the go.'

Mobile phone carriers announce region-specific availability and pricing, plus additional product details over the coming months. Palm has announced that it expects to be supplying its Treo range to 20 carriers by June 2007 in order to expand its global coverage.

'Introducing more smartphones faster and to more regions around the world has been a corporate objective of ours for the last year,' said Ed Colligan, Palm president and chief executive officer. 'Now that we've delivered on all four promised smartphones, we are focused on expanding our global reach with each of them.'

As if to illustrate his point, Palm has also announced that Treo users can now download a free Palm OS version of Google Maps from google.com/gmm. The application provides directions, local search, moveable and scalable maps, location satellite imagery and traffic updates.

Author: Simon Aughton