Today Palm introduced its Treo 680 smartphone with the intention of expanding the market for smartphones out of vertical markets like enterprise, business, and government and out into the mainstream mobile phone-using population. And to back it up, the Treo 680 comes in hip colors, is slimmer than its older Treo brethren, and will be backed by a $25 million marketing campaign from Palm.
“The Treo 680 is the smartphone for everyone. It’s small, sleek, fast and comes in a variety of fun colors,” said Ed Colligan, Palm’s president and CEO. “It’s a great phone design, great for messaging and email, and provides users easy and fast access to the Internet and to their favorite music and pictures, and makes it easy for people to manage and balance their business and personal lives while on the go.”
The Treo 680 is a quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE smartphone powered by an Intel PXA270 312 MHz processor; the phone sports an easy-type QWERTY keyboard, a 320 by 240 color screen, 64 MB of user memory (expandable via MMC and SD cards), a VGA resolution video-capable digital camera, a speakerphone, and both Bluetooth 1.2 and mini-USB connectivity. On the software side, the phone offer full-featured email and Web browsing capabilities, including Exchange ActiveSync and the new Blazer 4.5 Web browser. The phone supports MP3 playback, music streaming, video, and photos, and can be used as a Bluetooth wireless modem to connect a Bluetooth-enabled laptop to the Internet. In addition, users can edit and share Microsoft Word and Excel documents using Documents To Go, and view both PDF files and PowerPoint presentations. Oh—and cool colors: crimson, copper, graphite, and “arctic.”
Pricing and carrier information for the Treo 680 hasn’t been released yet—expect announcements throughout the remainder of 2006—but Palm expects the Treo to appeal to price-conscious consumers. For a limited time, Treo 680s will be bundled with a 30-day trial for Yahoo Music Unlimited.
