Palm rings up Treo 700p smartphone: blending broadbandlike speeds with world-class Palm OS usability.

School administrators and teachers now have a choice of smartphone operating systems from Palm, Inc. The new Palm Treo 700p smartphone includes hardware and software innovations centered around usability, connectivity, multimedia and compatibility.

The first Palm OS CDMA-based Treo smartphone to offer the broadbandlike speeds of the EvDO (Evolution Data Optimized) network(1), the Treo 700p smartphone helps users better balance their personal and professional lives by combining an easy-to-use mobile phone with high-speed wireless data access to web, email, business and multimedia applications.(2)

Pricing and availability for the Palm Treo 700p smartphone will be announced by Sprint and Verizon Wireless.

"The release of this Palm OS-based product on the latest high-speed network technology is a welcome development for our education customers because it is clear validation that we intend to continue to focus on multiple platforms for our solutions," says Eric Johnson, general manager for education at Palm.

As the newest member of the Treo family, the Treo 700p smartphone combines the award-winning hardware design of the Treo 700w smartphone with Palm's innovative software that has shipped on approximately 3 million Palm OS-based Treo smartphones worldwide. Palm differentiates this smartphone from others in the Treo line by offering the following features along with many additional enhancements:

* Adding a fast data connection to the already efficient Palm OS platform speeds email, messaging and large attachment downloads, and dramatically enhances web browsing. The speed of EvDO also allows for an enjoyable experience when streaming multimedia content, and the Treo 700p smartphone ships with Palm's first built-in streaming application. The Treo 700p streams mobile content, such as live TV, movie clips and audio from radio stations, as well as training videos or company communications.

* Treo 700p smartphone users can take advantage of broadband-like EvDO speeds on their laptop computers by using the new smartphone as a wireless modern via USB or Bluetooth wireless technology. This functionality may eliminate the need to purchase Wi-Fi or other connectivity services at coffee shops, airports and hotels. For the first time on any Treo product, this capability is available out of the box. Individual carriers will set pricing for appropriate data plans.

* In addition to the new streaming application, the Treo 700p smartphone now includes a 1.3-megapixel camera and camcorder, offering four times the resolution of a VGA camera. To help Palm customers organize and share their photos, the new product makes it significantly easier to create and manage photo and video albums. Once albums are created, Treo 700p smartphone customers can use the slideshow application to add music, audio captions and transitions.

* The Treo 700p includes Pocket Tunes from NormSoft, Inc. for playing music files. The new application, with an easy-to-use Palm-customized user interface, offers customers more options for sorting music and making play lists. With an upgrade to Pocket Tunes Deluxe, Treo 700p customers can play content from all music stores that use Microsoft's PlaysForSure/ Janus technology.

* The Palm OS based Treo 700p smartphone includes 128MB of memory (60MB user available). By using SD memory cards, currently available with 2GB of storage (sold separately), in addition to the 60MB of dedicated user storage, users have plenty of room to download and carry important documents and multimedia content.

Fast Facts Treo 700p Features

* Superior phone functionality, including personalized ring tones for various categories of callers and the ability to ignore a call with text messaging;

* New voice-memo application, which can be used to create custom ring tones, add voice annotations to photos or simply record a memo;

* Enhanced email and messaging, including better Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 ActiveSync support, which now includes contact sync in addition to email and calendar, as well as threaded SMS/MMS messages in a single chat view and out-of-the-box support for Yahoo!, AOL, and Gmail;

* Smarter, faster web browsing using a new and improved version of the award-winning Blazer browser;

* Full PDF support using DataViz Documents To Go Version 8.0, which also offers native support for Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint; and

* The fast, friendly and familiar Palm OS platform, Version 5.4.9.