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Today, Palm started making the Treo 750 more broadly available in Europe through its online store. The company plans to extend the smartphone to additional retail outlets as well throughout the coming month.

When Palm shipped the Treo 750 in September 2006, its first Windows Mobile smartphone for GSM operators, the mobile device vendor did so in partnership with Vodafone, but only in the U.K. and a few other Western European countries. In January, Cingular Wireless extended the new Treo to its customers in the U.S.

Significantly, this will be the first Treo 750 available with 3.5G HSPDA data networking standard. Earlier versions of the smartphone only supported UTMS 3G. HSPDA is an extension of the UMTS that delivers considerably faster performance. A software patch to enable HSPDA on earlier versions of the Treo 750 should be made available in the future, according to Palm.

The quad-band GSM Treo 750 weighs 5.4 ounces (154 grams) and measures 4.4 x 2.3 x 0.87 inches (111 x 58 x 22 millimeters). As with the Palm OS Treo 680, the smartphone looses the signature Treo antenna. Something Europeans, in particular, weren't very fond of.

Specifications include Windows Mobile 5.0, a 300 MHz Samsung processor, and 128MB 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 resolution screen than the 320 x 320 type used in Palm OS Treos, but that's because Windows Mobile only handles that lower resolution (or multiples thereof) in a square display.

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 Treo 750 supports 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.