palmOne Treo 650

Treo 650After months of speculation and leaked product photos, palmOne has finally launched the Treo 650, an upgrade to its very popular Treo 600 smartphone. The Treo 650 will be available as either a digital dual-band CDMA/1xRTT or a GSM/GPRS/EDGE quad-band world phone, with pricing to be set by individual carriers. The Treo 650's major new features include the addition of Bluetooth, higher screen resolution (bumped up from 160x160 to 320x320), support for EDGE networks, and a faster processor.

Obviously email and mobile messaging is o great importance on a device such as the Treo 650, which supports popular POP and IMAP email clients, so that users can download mail wirelessly or by syncing with their desktops And for users whose organizations use Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, the Treo 650?s built-in Microsoft Exchange Server ActiveSync support will enable direct corporate email and calendar synchronization. Versamail (the name of the email application) can also display photos, HTML, and even native Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint attachments.

One of the major drawbacks in the Treo 600 was the lack of Bluetooth. The new Treo 650 suports most major Bluetooth profiles, so connecting to compatible Bluetooth wireless devices -- such as headsets and car kits -- is easy using the setup wizard.

The Treo 650 is heavily geared towads the mobile professional and with Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, Memos and more, it has all the features of a full blown organiser. Users can dial contacts by name from their contacts list or enter a name or number on the QWERTY keyboard or on-screen dial pad. Speakerphone, speed dial, conference calling, call history, and caller ID are all available to manage calls.

The software on the Treo 650 has been greatly improved over its predecessor and includes Documents To Go 7 with native MS Office support, SMS/MMS support, MP3 playback, and the new palmOne media suite.

Overall, the Treo 650 is a nice upgrade to the earlier model, and we expect it to sell just as well, or even better. Carrier availability is expected to begin later this year in the United States, with worldwide rollout to follow in 2005.