Tuesday, October 17, 2006 Limpag: Palm unveils new smartphone By Max Limpag Celltalk
SMARTPHONE FOR THE MASSES. Palm last week unveiled its Palm Treo 680, the latest in its smartphone product line.
Chief executive Ed Colligan, according to a Reuters report, said the new model will be sold at the $200 range, or less than P15,000, which makes it a mid-end phone in our country. “Customers will find the Treo 680 smartphone easy to use, slim and compact, yet packed full of features beyond its stellar phone capability, such as email, web browsing, messaging, multimedia, calendar, contacts and more,” the company said in a press statement. The Palm Treo 680 is a GSM phone and will work with Philippine carriers. It will come in four colors: crimson, copper, arctic and graphite.
FEATURES. The Treo 680 comes with a 64MB phone memory, which the company said is thrice the capacity of the original Treo smartphone, the Treo 650. The memory is expandable up to 2GB through expansion cards. The phone also comes with “enhanced email and messaging.” It comes with Exchange ActiveSync to synchronize calendar, email, and contacts data. The Treo 680 also comes with the Blazer 4.5 browser, which the company described as “super fast due to its smarter caching rules.” With the browser, you can chose whether to view pages optimized for mobile devices or regular HTML editions. The phone also comes with an easy access to Google Maps.
I haven’t tried Blazer 4.5 though so I don’t have any idea how it stacks up with the Opera Mini, which is probably the best browser for mobile devices.
The phone also serves as a multi-media player as it can play digital music and video files. You can take photos and video footage using the device and play and record audio. I don’t know how it stacks up with other music mobiles but if you’re interest is on having a phone with the best digital music capabilities, you’re probably better off checking the Walkman phones of Sony Ericsson or the Rokr of Motorola. The Treo’s strength isn’t in multimedia, it lies somewhere else.
PDA FUNCTIONS. The Treo 680, being a Palm product, serves as a full-fledged organizer and this is an area where the model dominates. Before Palm started turning out smartphones, it was producing personal digital assistants (PDA). In fact Palm is widely considered to be a leader in the PDA market and you’d expect it to get PDA functionalities for its phones right. The Treo 680 also comes with Documents to Go, a system that allows users to view, edit, and even share Microsoft Word and Excel documents. The system also allows Treo 680 users to view PDF files and PowerPoint presentations.
The phone will be available starting this month and if you’re still deciding which unit to buy yourself this Christmas, make a mental note to consider the Treo 680.
