Palm launches sleek Treo 680 smartphone

Microwarehouse Inc., the exclusive distributor of Palm products in the Philippines with more than 700 channels of resellers nationwide, introduced to the Philippine market last week Palm Inc.’s new Treo 680, a GSM/GPRS/EDGE quad-band smartphone.

Slim, compact and easy to use, the Treo 680 boasts features beyond its phone capability such as e-mail, Web browsing, messaging, multimedia, calendar, contacts and more.

Palm officials present during the launch believe that the Treo 680, which has a suggested retail price of P29,800, will appeal to feature-rich handset phone owners who want a more capable mobile computing device.

With the Palm OS-based Treo 680 smartphone, Palm is targeting new users in the rapidly growing smartphone and feature-phone markets. Market research firm In-Stat estimates that one out of four handsets worldwide will be smartphones by 2011.

Meanwhile, research conducted by Palm suggests a substantial population of feature-phone users have not purchased smartphones, fearing they were too expensive and too difficult to use. The Treo 680 will offer an affordable, simple and fun way to get started and stay connected.

"The Treo 680 is small, sleek and fast, and is the smartphone for everyone. It boasts a great phone design, is ideal for messaging and e-mail, and provides users easy and fast access to the Internet and to their favorite music and pictures," said John Hartnett, senior vice president for global markets of Palm Inc.

"The Treo 680 brings the award-winning Palm experience to a broader range of users, and makes it easy to manage and balance work and personal life while on the go," he added.

Known for ease of use, Palm differentiates the Treo 680 smartphone from others in the Treo family by offering numerous features along with many additional enhancements.

First of all, the Treo 680 has an internal antenna and slim form factor, making the device compact and lightweight. It has a full, easy-type keyboard – perfect for writing SMS messages and e-mails – and an optimal 320 x 320 vibrant color screen for viewing webpages, photos, media and more.

The Treo 680 smartphone has a unique phone user interface that further simplifies Treo innovations, such as the ability to respond to calls with a preset text message and add new phone numbers to existing contact information, and three-way calling. The Treo 680 also has integrated e-mail and Web capabilities, so users can stay in touch with colleagues and friends.

The messaging application on the Treo 680 displays text-messaging conversations as "threaded chats," similar to instant messaging, so users can see their entire conversation with a particular person.

The Treo 680 smartphone also can be used as an MP3 player and has an integrated VGA camera, camcorder, video player and photo album that can be managed and shared.

The Treo 680 smartphone offers many additional features, including 64MB of user-available storage, nearly three times the memory of the original Treo 650 smartphone. Users can add up to 2GB of storage with expansion cards (sold separately) for large music or video files.

The Exchange ActiveSync application will now synchronize not only calendar and e-mail, but contacts as well. SMS and MMS capabilities have also been improved for a better user experience. The Treo’s Blazer 4.5 browser has now been made superfast due to its smarter caching rules and includes alternate modes for viewing webpages optimized for the device or as a regular webpage.

Users can also now use the Treo 680 as a wireless modem via Bluetooth wireless technology to connect to a compatible Bluetooth-enabled laptop. They can also view, edit and share Microsoft Word and Excel documents on the Treo 680 in addition to viewing full-featured Adobe PDF files and Microsoft PowerPoint presentations. Last but not least users can connect wirelessly to other Bluetooth-enabled devices, as the Treo 680 boasts improved headset support, as well as support for multiple simultaneous Bluetooth connections.