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At the CTIA Wireless I.T & Entertainment Expo two weeks back, palmOne finally unveiled the Treo 650, its follow-up to the highly-regarded Treo 600 smartphone.

First available in the United States from Sprint (you can pre-order now), the company said other American and worldwide operators should roll out the Treo 650 next year. Now comes a more concrete time frame for Treo 650 distribution in Europe: Europeans looking forward to the new smartphone can mark February as its launch month on that continent. Orange and O2 are among the European carriers expected to support the handset.

When explaining the delay between U.S. and European Treo 650 distribution, palmOne President Ed Colligam recently said that the company couldn't ship the Treo 650 everywhere at once because of the need to partner with carriers to get the smartphone and supporting services right for their individual networks. He told NewsWireless.Net, "There's an enormous amount of effort that goes to tying these things (Treos) to the solutions of any carrier partner."

The Treo 650 will ship as a dual-band CDMA/1xRTT and a GSM/GPRS/EDGE quad-band (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) world phone, with pricing to be set by individual carriers.

Treo 650
Although not a reinvention of the Treo 600, the Treo 650 fixes some weaknesses of the earlier model, while adding some nice new features.

The new smartphone's dimensions, 4.4 x 2.3 x 0.9 inches (113 x 59 x 23 mm), weight, 6.3 ounces (178 grams), and overall appearance is similar to the Treo 600's. Like the earlier model, there is also a Secure Digital slot, which should—when a driver is ready sometime after initial shipment—support palmOne's new Wi-Fi SD card. Treo 650 also integrates a QWERTY thumb-keyboard like the Treo 600, but with an improved backlight and a more user-friendly design.

Unlike the Treo 600 and its 160 x 160 screen, the Treo 650 will have a high-resolution 320 x 320 display, which should make it easier to read documents and Web pages. The Treo 650 also integrates Bluetooth, a glaring omission in the current model. Bluetooth allows Treo owners to use wireless headsets and print to Bluetooth printers, for example.

Unlike early rumors, the Treo 650 does not integrate a one-megapixel camera. Rather, it includes a VGA model for 640 x 480 or 352 x 288 pixel images like the Treo 600. The new smartphone’s camera is supposed to be better, however, with improved picture and video taking in low-light situations.

To palmOne, the CMOS camera solution it uses in the Treo 650, as opposed to a CCD implementation like with the Treo 600, doesn’t deliver good enough quality pictures in dim light at one-megapixel as it does at VGA.

As we reported with other recent Palm-based devices, such as palmOne's new Tungsten T5 (see Review: Tungsten T5 – palmOne’s Bold Guess), the Treo 650 does not run PalmSource's newest operating system, Cobalt. It uses an earlier version of the platform called Garnet 5.4.5. (Although PalmSource shipped Cobalt to device manufacturers late last year, not once device has appeared with it.)

With the Treo 650, you also get a 312 MHz Intel XScale PXA270 processor and twice the memory, 32MB, of the Treo 600—only around 23MB (a paltry amount by today's standards) will be available to the user.

As for the CPU, it leverages Intel’s Wireless Step technology to determine how much power is needed for a particular function, with goal of preserving battery life. It is also MMX-enabled for improved mobile multimedia.

As with the Tungsten T5 and its 256MB of memory, the Treo 650's RAM is non-volatile flash. That's means all your data will be maintained in the event of a complete power loss. This makes data much safer than with most other smartphones and PDAs.

Unlike the Treo 600's battery, the new smartphone's is removable. So you can carry an extra battery (sold separately), and swap it out for additional power on the fly.