Palm has announced the eagerly awaited Palm OS version of the Treo 700 it launched earlier this year with Windows Mobile on board. The US version of the 700p builds on the existing Treo 650 by adding support for the US 3G system, EVDO.

In the US, the handset will be offered by Sprint and Verizon. As yet Palm hasn't said whether the 700p will be available in Europe, but it's been pushing the 650 hard of late, suggesting it may be trying to clear the decks ahead of the arrival of its successor.

The handset sports a 312MHz Intel XScale processor and 128MB of Flash memory, 60MB of which is available to the user. The display is a 320 x 320, 65,536-colour job, and there's a 1.3-megapixel camera with 2x digital zoom on the back.

The phone has an SD IO card slot, though since Palm believes the use of EVDO technology means the 700p really doesn't need Wi-Fi, it's unlikely the slot will gain Palm's backing for the addition of a Wi-Fi card. The Treo does have Bluetooth on board.

The new model runs Palm OS 5.4.9, and bundles DataViz' Documents To Go for native Microsoft Office file viewing and editing, and PDF display. The 700p's email client can tie into Exchange Server 2003 via ActiveSync, plus POP and IMAP accounts. Yahoo!, AOL and Gmail are also supported.

Palm did not provide pricing, leaving that to its carrier partners to reveal in due course. ®