Palm Tips Treo 750 Smartphone

Palm on Sunday, at the CES show in Las Vegas, rolled out the Treo 750, the latest addition to its line of Treo smartphones that use carriers' third-generation (3G) cellular networks to connect business professionals to the Internet at higher speeds than previously possible.

It's the first Windows Mobile 5.0-powered smartphone to become available from Cingular and the first Treo to use Cingular's 3G network. "This is a great opportunity for us to expand our business," said Tara Griffin, Palm's VP of enterprise markets, during a news conference last week.

The Treo comes with several e-mail options: Cingular's out-of-the-box service called Xpress Mail for personal accounts like AOL and Yahoo, Microsoft's "direct push" e-mail for companies using Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, and Good Technology's service for companies using other e-mail servers. Wireless e-mail is a must-have option on smartphones for business professionals, followed by access to business applications. In response to the growing use of text-messaging as a communications channel, Palm added a new messaging app to the Treo 750 that creates a thread of text-messages for record-keeping purposes.

One major enhancement to the Treo 750, not found in previous Windows Mobile models, is a messaging application that serves up a threaded view of chats conducted through text and multimedia messages. The feature was highly requested by customers, says Palm.

Treo 750 will be available starting this week for $400, with a two-year subscription to Cingular and mail-in rebate.Palm is the second-largest smartphone marker in the U.S. behind Research In Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile is the third most popular mobile operating system in the world.

With the top three cellular carriers in the U.S.--Cingular, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint--now offering Windows Mobile Treos with high-speed data capabilities, professionals aren't restricted to a single carrier or smartphone model. More important, they finally have fast-enough data connections to work remotely on their smartphones.