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Those in the U.S. anxious to get their hands on Palm's Treo 750 may not have to wait too much longer do so. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has just cleared the company's first Windows Mobile smartphone for GSM carriers for release in this country.

Palm launched the Treo 750 in Europe this past September, when carrier-giant Vodafone started rolling out the smartphone in Europe. The Treo 750 is Palm's first new release on the continent in years. And it couldn't of come at a better moment, as Palm had to stop shipping its only smartphone available in Europe, the Treo 650, because of the EU’s RoHS pollution law a couple of months earlier.

It is expected Cingular will be the first U.S. operator to deliver the new Treo, which is also the first Palm smartphone with 3G UMTS/HSPDA cellular-wireless technology. Not only that, America's largest mobile operator should soon make the upcoming Palm OS Treo 680 - the first 'low-cost' Treo - available here as well in the not too distant future.

Both new models are the first Treos without an external antenna.

Past rumors indicated the Treo 680 would ship from Cingular sometime this month, while the Treo 750 wouldn't make its appearance in the states until sometime after that, perhaps in December or January.

Maybe FCC approval means the Treo 750 could become available sooner? We'll have to wait a little longer to find out.


                          Treo 750 FCC ID label

More on the Treo 750
There's every reason to believe the Cingular edition will feature the same specs. The Treo 750v, Vodafone's version, is a quad-band world phone that weighs 5.4 ounces (154 grams) and measures 4.4 x 2.3 x 0.87 inches (111 x 58 x 22 millimeters).

It runs on Windows Mobile 5.0, a 300 MHz Samsung processor, and 128 MB of nonvolatile flash memory (60 MB user available). There's a square 240 x 240 pixel resolution touch display that supports over 65,000 colors. This is a lower screen resolution than the 320 x 320 type used in Palm OS Treos, like the upcoming Treo 680, but that's because Windows Mobile isn't designed to enable that higher resolution.

A 1.3-megapixel camera for picture and video lets you take images up to 1280 x 1024 pixels in size with a 2x digital zoom. For audio, there's a microphone, speaker, a 2.5-mm headset jack, and Bluetooth with support for stereo headsets. There's also a miniSD expansion slot and a replaceable/rechargeable 1200 mAH lithium-ion battery that Palm says offers 4.5 hours of talk over a GSM connection and 10 days standby time.

The 750v ships with Microsoft's Messaging and Security Feature Pack (also known as AKU2), which includes Direct Push and data access to Exchange server, for free out of the box. This delivers push e-mail, calendar entries, contacts, and tasks; native S/MIME support, certificate-based authentication to all Exchange data; and remote and local device wipe.

As with previous Windows Mobile Treos, the 750v includes enhancements exclusively added by Palm and not available to other devices running Microsoft's wireless platform. These would include Today Screen improvements, such as the ability to "dial by name" with a few keystrokes on the keyboard, perform a web search directly from the Today Screen, and one-touch dialing with personalized photo speed dials.