Palm unveils the Treo 680 smartphone!

From Palm Inc.:

For people who are ready to move up to a full-featured mobile phone that includes everything needed to stay organized, Palm, Inc. today announced the Palm Treo 680 smartphone, a GSM/GPRS/EDGE quad-band world phone. 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. In the coming weeks and months, carriers around the world will announce additional product details, availability and exact pricing. Palm believes this product will appeal to price-sensitive feature-phone owners who want a more capable mobile-computing device.

Palm's U.S. retail and online stores will sell exclusively an unlocked GSM version in four new cool colors - crimson, copper, arctic and graphite. For a limited time, they will come complete with a music bundle from Yahoo!, which includes a 30-day free trial to its music service. With Yahoo! Music Unlimited, users have access to more than 1 million songs to take with them anywhere.

With the introduction of the Palm OS based Treo 680 smartphone, Palm is targeting new users in the rapidly growing smartphone and feature-phone markets. Market research firm In-Stat, estimates that 25 percent of all wireless handsets worldwide will be smartphones by 2011. Research conducted by Palm suggests a substantial population of feature-phone users have not purchased smartphones, fearing they were too expensive and too difficult to use. The Treo 680 will offer an affordable, simple and fun way to get started and stay connected.

"The Treo 680 is the smartphone for everyone. It's small, sleek, fast and comes in a variety of fun colors," said Ed Colligan, president and chief executive officer of Palm, Inc. "It's a great phone design, great for messaging and email, and provides users easy and fast access to the Internet and to their favorite music and pictures, and makes it easy for people to manage and balance their business and personal lives while on the go."

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