Click to View

Despite some delays and stock issues, Cingular, Sprint and AT&T have been offering palmOne's Treo 600 Communicator in the United States for several months now. And T-Mobile recently announced plans to deliver the smartphone to its customers.

That leaves Verizon Wireless, which temporarily holds the title of the "largest wireless carrier in the U.S" (until Cingular and AT&T merge) without the popular device.

It appears that is about to change. Verizon posted a note yesterday stating that it would soon be offering the Treo 600. This would be a major achievement for palmOne, as few phone and smartphone vendors can say all the major carriers in the U.S have offered a mobile handset of theirs. It also gives credence to the company's stated goal of growing its smartphone line and expanding that side of the business.

The smartphone market is expected to grow considerably over the next few years, eclipsing the current PDA market and taking a greater chunk out of the mobile phone market in general. ARCchart predicts that smartphones will constitute 40% of the total handset market by 2008. This would mean nearly 300 million units sold. In comparison, the PDA market consisted of 10.4 million units sold last year.

Treo 600

The Treo 600 features a smaller more phone like form factor than earlier Treos, yet still maintains a fully integrated QWERTY keyboard. The device measures 4.41 x 2.26 x .87 inches and weighs 5.9 ounces in the GPRS version and a little over 6 ounces in the CDMA edition.

The smartphone gets a considerable boost in power over previous Treos with a 144 MHz Texas Instruments OMAP CPU, 32MB of RAM (22MB to 25MB usable) and Palm OS 5.2.1. Treo also gets memory and peripheral expansion support with a Secure Digital In Out (SDIO) slot.

The Treo 600's CSTN display only has a 160x160 pixel resolution and is smaller than the screens on the older Treo 270 and 300. It measures 2.7-inches diagonally. However, the screen has been improved and is good for both indoor and outdoor viewing. The Treo 600 uses a 1800 mAh rechargeable but non-removable battery for two weeks of standby time and six hours of either talk or online time for the GSM edition of the smartphone and five or more hours for the CDMA Treo 600.

The Treo 600's keyboard features a domed key shape and improved layout, with more surface area than those on earlier Treo products, and letters and numbers have been enlarged for better readability.

It features a five-way navigation system (up, down, left, right, center) that is tightly integrated with the bundled software on the device for moving within and between applications using one hand.

Additional features include a new proxyless version of the Blazer web browser to enable full web browsing and secure access to corporate intranets with better frames and JavaScript support, a built-in VGA (640 x 480 pixel) camera for taking and sending pictures and setting up picture caller ID, and a dual speaker architecture for phone and system audio.