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  Other PDAs > News > New Info Emerges on Palm's Latest Treo

New Info Emerges on Palm's Latest Treo

By James Alan Miller
August 29, 2006

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Palm's next Treo will be announced be announced by the handheld maker and Vodafone as the Treo 750v on September 12th. The source that posted revealing pictures of the handheld maker's upcoming smartphone has revealed some more details about the device.

According to Tatsdiy.com, the upcoming Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC Phone, which supports high-speed GSM-based UTMS cellular networking, won't be the first Palm smartphone to integrate Wi-Fi after all. It was thought it might, since a leaked roadmap describing this smartphone for Cingular mentions WLAN and Palm's CEO Ed Colligan said last month his company would finally start adding the technology to its products.

(Cingular will likely get the smartphone sometime later in the fall, after Vodafone begins rolling it out throughout its various European regions.)

The new Treo's miniSD slot expansion slot—it was previously thought to have a full-size SD slot—may be SDIO (Secure Digital In Out) enabled, however. That would mean you'd be able to plug in external peripherals, including WLAN cards, should they become available.

Treo 750v's capped SDIO card slot (see picture) could be a problem however, especially for the antenna on a Wi-Fi card. SDIO peripherals as a species tend not to fit comfortably in slots like their memory card brethren. There's always a piece of them that needs room to breathe.

Tatsdiy.com also says the Treo 750v's replaceable/rechargeable battery is slimmer than the Treo 650's. This would likely make the new model smaller than the current one, but may also reduce the amount of power available, as it could drain faster. This would have been a good reason not to include power hungry Wi-Fi on Palm's part. We'll have to wait and see if there's any real effect, however.

Other reported specs include a 312 MHz processor, 64 MB or RAM, 128 MB or RAM and a square 240 x 240 pixel resolution touch display. The processor clocks in at the same speed as Verizon's Treo 700w and it appears to have same screen res as that Windows Mobile model.

For audio, there's microphone, speaker, and a 2.5-mm headset jack.

From the leaked pictures, the new Treo seems to look a lot like earlier models except for the color of the casing, which is now blue, and the hue of the keys on the keyboard, which have been transposed. Where they're black on the Treo 700p, for example, they’re white now and vice versa. The Treo 750v also has Palm's 5-way directional pad and hardware buttons for input.

A 1.3-megapixel camera lets you take images up to 1280 x 1024 pixels in size.

As we've emphasized before, Palm probably doesn't want to wait too long to get the new Treo into end-users after the official annoucement with Vodafone a couple of weeks from now. And it should get the Cingular edition out here as soon as possible too.

The idea would be to cash in on the holiday season. Otherwise it may lose out on all important shelf space to competitors, as retailers would have made their final decisions on what to stock after that period.

There's certainly a market for a GSM/UTMS Treo in Europe and North America. Europe hasn't seen a Treo update since the Treo 650 launched—that Treo had to be pulled this summer because of its failure to comply with the European Union's RoHS pollution law—and Palm's most recent Treos, the 700w (Windows Mobile) and 700p (Palm OS), are only available from CDMA/EV-DO operators Verizon and Sprint in this country.

While both operators launched the 700p simultaneously, Sprint is just now offering its version of the 700w, called the 700wx, about nine months after Verizon.



Related Links:

  • Pics Paint Picture of Palm Treo 750
  • Palm to Announce Treo 750 Next Month
  • Leaked Images Confirm Treo 750 For Cingular
  • Palm, Vodafone Partner on 3G Treo
  • Wi-Fi Integration Coming to Future Treos

     
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