PalmOne Treo 650 details confirmed

Company exec's post-launch spiel published too soon, it seems

By Tony Smith • Get more from this author

Posted in Mobile, 19th October 2004 09:26 GMT

Free webcast: Service level monitoring and management

Details of PalmOne's launch plan for the much-anticipated successor to the Treo 600 have leaked on to the web.

The Treo 650 will launch - unless PalmOne now changes its mind - in just under a week's time, on 25 October. The venue: the CTIA Wireless IT show in San Francisco.

The information came courtesy of PalmOne product marketing chief Greg Shirai, in an interview with Internetnews.com, which appears to have run the piece too early. Whoops. The site has now pulled the story.

However, before the site did so, it was possible to read a confirmation of much that has been written about the Treo 650. The communicator, codenamed 'Ace', will indeed feature a 320 x 320 colour display, mini QWERTY keyboard, removable battery, and phone-style call make and break buttons.

The device is expected to ship with 32MB of memory, 20MB of which is available to the user. Shirai suggested that all or some of this memory will be Flash, to retain data when the battery is swapped out. That mirrors what PalmOne has done with the Tungsten line: the recently launched Tungsten T5 PDA includes 256MB of memory, all of it Flash.

The Treo 650 will be offered in quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE and dual-band CMDA/1XRTT versions, with North American carriers expected to announce availability in the next few weeks, according to Shirai. The 650 is not expected to ship from launch, but will be made available in the US in time for the Thanksgiving/Christmas sales period.

Sources close to Taiwanese handset manufacturer HTC have claimed that the company is producing the 650 for PalmOne and has already begun ramping up volumes.

Beyond the details provided in the Shirai interview, the 650 is expected to be powered by a 312MHz Intel XScale PXA270 processor and run PalmSource's 'Garnet' OS, aka Palm OS 5.4.5, as does the T5. The 650 also sports an SD card slot with IO support. ®