Palm Announces Palm OS GSM Treo 680 & Surprises!
Today, at the Digital Life consumer-oriented electronics conference in New York City, Palm announced a new low priced GSM Palm OS Treo 680 smartphone plus some surprises, including partnerships with eBay, Google Maps and Yahoo Music. Palm’s CEO Ed Colligan indicated that this was the fourth model out of four planned this year, following on the heels of the Treo 700p, Treo 700w (and wx), and Treo 750v.
Palm’s CEO Ed Colligan
In our view the new Treo 680 will be a tremendous success. Initially the device is expected to retail for $199.95. But it could quickly become free for new subscribers signing two year service contracts for voice and data. Although no carrier was announced at Digital Life, Palm indicated the Treo 680 was designed to work on the Cingular and T-Mobile networks, and will quickly be rolled out on 20 carriers “worldwide.” Because this is the first Palm OS GSM Treo device in nearly two years and has double the memory of existing GSM Palm OS models, loyal Palm OS GSM customers are candidates to upgrade. It comes in four attractive colors, has new software enhancements (including major changes to the phone and email applications), and is designed specifically to work with eBay, Google Maps and Yahoo Music right out of the box.
Palm insiders tell us that next year will be “even more exciting than this year” for the company. This year brought with it an operating system “revolution,” with the introduction of a Windows Mobile Treo 700w (and 700wx), Palm’s first foray into the non-Palm operating system realm. But it was more of an “evolutionary” year with respect to changing hardware specifications. The community has been waiting with baited breath not just for a great mass market smartphone (which we think the Treo 680 will be), but also for an early adopter’s high end device, which will represent the same kind of jump forward that the Treo 600 was relative to the Treo 180/270/300. We hope that’s what, “even more exciting than this year,” means with respect to future model releases.
With the introduction of the Blackberry Pearl and Motorola Q in recent months, the smartphone market has become competitive for Palm. There are also rumors among industry insiders close to mytreo.net that a partnership between Research In Motion and Apple Computer is brewing. Still, our bet is on Palm, one of the most creative companies on earth, and still the best at delivering superb user experience and value in convergent devices.
Want to know more? Check out the video-cast of mytreo.net’s private one-on-one with the Treo 680 Product Manager from Palm or discuss the device in our new Treo 680 forum!
Palm Press Release
NEW YORK–(Press Release)–For people who are ready to move up to a full-featured mobile phone that includes everything needed to stay organized, Palm, Inc. (Nasdaq:PALM) today announced the Palm Treo 680 smartphone, a GSM/GPRS/EDGE quad-band world phone. Customers will find the Treo 680 smartphone easy to use, slim and compact, yet packed full of features beyond its stellar phone capability, such as email, web browsing, messaging, multimedia, calendar, contacts and more. In the coming weeks and months, carriers around the world will announce additional product details, availability and exact pricing. Palm believes this product will appeal to price-sensitive feature-phone owners who want a more capable mobile-computing device.
Palm’s U.S. retail and online stores will sell exclusively an unlocked GSM version in four new cool colors – crimson, copper, arctic and graphite. For a limited time, they will come complete with a music bundle from Yahoo!, which includes a 30-day free trial to its music service. With Yahoo! Music Unlimited, users have access to more than 1 million songs to take with them anywhere.
With the introduction of 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 25 percent of all wireless handsets worldwide will be smartphones by 2011. 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 the smartphone for everyone. It’s small, sleek, fast and comes in a variety of fun colors,” said Ed Colligan, president and chief executive officer of Palm, Inc. “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.”
During a press conference at DigitalLife in New York City, the audience saw Palm’s innovative hardware design and integrated, easy-to-use software. Known for ease of use, Palm differentiates the Treo 680 smartphone from others in the Treo family by offering the following features along with many additional enhancements:
New Design
The Treo 680 smartphone has an internal antenna and slim form factor, making the device smaller and sleeker than its Treo predecessors in the United States. It has a full, easy-type keyboard, perfect for writing SMS messages and emails, and an optimal 320×320 vibrant color screen for viewing web pages, photos, media and more.
All-in-one, Smarter Phone
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 email 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 IM, 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 digital camera, camcorder and video player.
Additional Features
The Treo 680 smartphone offers many additional features, including the following:
- Added memory: The Treo 680 smartphone includes 64MB of user-available storage, nearly three times the memory of the original Treo 650 smartphone. Customers can add up to 2GB of storage with expansion cards for those large music or video files (sold separately);
- Enhanced email and messaging: Exchange ActiveSync will now synchronize not only calendar and email, but contacts as well; SMS and MMS capabilities have been improved for a better user experience;
- Improved web browser: The Blazer 4.5 browser is superfast due to its smarter caching rules and includes alternate modes for viewing web pages optimized for the device or as a regular web page;
- Enhanced multimedia: Customers can use the Treo 680 smartphone to stream music, play MP3s and manage and share photo albums;
- Built-in dial-up networking (DUN) capabilities: Customers can use the new smartphone as a wireless modem via Bluetooth(R) wireless technology to connect to a compatible Bluetooth enabled laptop;
- Documents To Go: Customers can view, edit and share Microsoft Word and Excel documents on their Treo 680 smartphones in addition to viewing full-featured Adobe PDF files and Microsoft PowerPoint presentations; and
- Bluetooth 1.2: Customers can connect wirelessly to other Bluetooth enabled devices. The Treo 680 has improved car-kit and headset support, and support for multiple simultaneous Bluetooth connections.
Related Links
Purchase a Treo smartphone now!
Read about prospective “Treo Killers.”
Read about the recent Treo 750v announcement.
Filed under: Treo and Palm news
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Good entry level phone, has quite a few improvements but definately not to be considered by any business/I.T. professional requiring high speed internet connectivity. I could live the low rez camera, 64MB of memory, and lack of WiFi but no UTMS/HSPDA in this day and age? Definate disappointment.
I have been enjoying using Treo 650 friendly features. Consumers prefer the Treo 680 etc to have WiFi for coming new models asap. (for my country Telcos are offering 2 to 3 years islandwide free broadband WiFi access) Can Treo spec match close to Sony Ericsson 990 PDA?
Tadd:
The community has been waiting with “‘bated breath,” not “baited breath.” It’s short for “abated breath.”
i see no significant improvement from 650. the only thing prominent is the 64 kb ram which double the 650’s. no wifi, utms is definitely a significant downside from this model. how can palm compete with windows if they don’t start provide better offerings?
Palm can do better and probably will, once they get rid of the 680s. For now, I’ll hang onto my 650. I have too much invested in batties (4) to switch to a device that can’t use what I’ve got. Maybe they’ll do a GSM phone with some backward hardware compatability. With no WiFi and no 3G, I can live with my small memory Treo 650.
Yup, baited breath :-)
That is, “I am waiting with a worm on my tongue”.
Sticking with my 650 also due to battery investment and other such things. Finally got a stable set of add-ons - don’t want to start all over.
More memory and Bluetooth 1.2 are the only features of value, but not enough for me. If they had WiFi this make me to consider the new phone. I will stay with 650 for now.
Palm is lagging behind. To become competive they have to rival Ericsson P990 and the upcoming Nokia N95. The former has business card scan and N95 will have build in GPS and excellent camera, but unfortunately no mini-keyboad. If N95 had keyboard and 4 frequency support I would jump on it once it out.
However, I am probably on wait till the end 2007/ early 2008 to upgrade when a unit with better rounded feature set is likely to show up.