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During the DigitalLife show in New York today, Palm introduced the Treo 680, its first Palm OS smartphone for GSM carriers in two years. The new model is the company's fourth Treo overall this year, however; following the Windows Mobile Treo 700w/wx and Palm platform Treo 700p for CDMA carriers Sprint and Verizon Wireless, and the Microsoft-based GSM Treo 750v just made available through Vodafone in Europe.

CEO Ed Colligan emphasized througout the press conference introducing the 680 that the new model isn't aimed mobile professionals like past Treos. But rather, as he put it, Palm wants to capture what Palm labels the mobile accomplisher market, which it said is 9x the size of the traditional smartphone target audience.

Palm defines mobile accomplishers as college-educated cell phone owners who are frequently on the go and away from their PC, but still want to strike a balance between their work and personal lives. They've thought about getting a smartphone before, but haven't because of fears it would be too complicated to use or expensive.

Although Palm didn't give any price specifics, Colligan said that when the 680 starts to enter the market in a month so, it will be the company's lowest-cost Treo yet. It will also be the easiest to use.

"Suffice it say, with more functionality and more capabilities, it will be very competitively priced in the market than any other smartphone product today, relative to the kind of capabilities this product will bring," Colligan asserted. "We really tried to push the design to make it more phone like too, so that after using the product, [you'll find] it's really a no compromise phone as well as an incredibly powerful computer."

As with the 750v, the 680 loses the Treo's signature antenna, making it decidedly sleeker-looking than the Treo 650, which it replaces. According to Colligan, the new smartphone’s cellular-radio is even more powerful than the earlier model's anyway, so it should deliver even better performance.

Its GSM/GPRS radio is also quad-band (850/900/1800/1900), making it a world phone. Palm said it expects 20 international carriers will pick up the 680 by June 2007. With it, Collgan said he hopes to expand upon Palm's success in the U.S. and the Americas to around the world. Recent rumors and leaks place Cingular Wireless as the operator which may deliver the 680, as well as a version of the 750v, first in the U.S.

While the device sports 2.5G EDGE data cellular-data networking, it doesn't implement any type of 3G; nor is there integrated Wi-Fi or support for Palm's expansion card that would add the capability. Lack of 3G and Wi-Fi (yet to find its way into any Palm smartphone) are probably due to price considerations.

Another causality is the quality of the 680's camera, which drops down to VGA - the same as the 650 - from the 1.3-megapixel types offered by other Treos released this year.

Additional specifications include the same 320 x 320 pixel resolution touch screen as recent Palm OS Treos, 64 MB user-available memory, a 312 MHz Intel PXA270 processor, and Bluetooth. Its 1200 mAH lithium-ion battery is supposed to last up to 4 hours talk and 300 hours standy time.

Palm also said, at 4.4 x 2.3 x 0.8 inches (111.8 x 58.4 x 20.3 millimeters) and 5.5 ounces (157 grams), the 680 is the smallest Treo yet. This is due to the battery being smaller and the sculpting of the device, which, according to Palm, makes it fit more comfortably in the hand.

The company is also giving consumers a choice of color for the first time. There's going to be 680's available in Graphite, Crimson, Arctic, and Copper.

Software
To make the new Treo even easier to use, to help encourage feature phone users who think smartphones are to hard to use to make the move up, Palm has upgraded the user interface and introduced a new five tab phone application. In addition, the Address Book and contacts are now built directly into the phone application.


5 Tab Phone App

The full User Guide is on the device, knowledge base articles will sync down when needed, and a most-recently-viewed feature has been added. So when you hold down the launcher key you can see the last several applications you used.

DataViz Documents To Go v8 is bundled for Microsoft Office document viewing and editing compatibility. The e-mail app, VersaMail, has been upgraded as well, as has the picture/video software. Pocket Tunes is included for playing MP3 files. It is upgradeable to the Deluxe version so you can play DRM protected content.

At launch, Palm will offer an unlocked Treo 680 bundle featuring a 1 GB SD card, stereo headset and Pocket Tunes Deluxe with a free one month trial of Yahoo! Music Unlimited for a limited time.

The 680 supports both audio and visual streaming media in the WMA and WMV formats.

There's a Voice Memo application that even allows you to set what you record as a ringtone.

At the press conference, Palm showed off the new Google Maps application for the Palm OS, which is compatible with the all Treo's built on the platform going back to the Treo 600. The free software delivers directions, local search, moveable/scalable maps, location satellite imagery and live traffic updates.

There's also a threaded chat application that tracks an SMS conversation as if it was an IM exchange, so you can view everything in one place. TypePad is a mobile blogging tool from a company called Six Apart that allows you to, well, blog text and images from the Treo.


SMS Threading

Palm has also updated the Web browser, improving it "quite a bit on this version of the device, " Colligan said, for faster performance and more accurate delivery of content.

Promotion
To support the roll out of the Treo 680, Palm is going to roll out $25 million advertising and marketing campaign. The main tag line will be 'Not Just A Cell Phone. A Treo.' "Because a Treo does more and gives you access to all the things you really care about," Colligan said.

The campaign will include partners like Yahoo!, eBay, Google, and Flickr. `So you'll see ads that read "go places, google things." or "do you yahoo! like this?" or "flickr this" or "winning feels good on eBay" for example.

The purpose, Colligan said, is to "make sure people understand not only can they use this to manage their lives, but they can also get access to all the things they care about wherever they are. And it's that kind of power that this product will do."