Here Comes the Treo 680

Hot off the press comes news from Palm and Cingular announcing that the Treo 680 will be available Nov. 24, otherwise ominously known as Black Friday.
The Treo 680 uses Palm OS 5.4.9 and sports a bevy of features beyond its predecessors, including many upgrades to the user interface.

Out of the box, it has full support for several file formats, inculding PDF, Word, Excel and Powerpoint, as well as various email options. But Palm insists that the Treo 680 isn’t just for work. Indeed the device comes with the Yahoo! Music Bundle. It can play MP3s and streaming audio.

Another cool feature (which might be present on other Treos—I’m not sure) is that text messaging can be viewed as one threaded conversation, rather than looking at each message individually. There is also a scrollable favorites list that is limited only by available memory, which is 64MB stock, but is expandable to 2GB.

On the tech side, the phone is driven by an Intel 312MHz processor. And it can get upto 4-hours of talk time or 300-hours of standby with its 1200mAh lithium ion battery.

All of the other standard phone fodder is there as well. It has a VGA camera/video recorder in addition to Bluetooth 1.2. It is DUN capable, so users will be able to use the device as a modem—unfortunately it only supports EDGE, so it won’t be a very fast modem.

It will be available for $199.99 with a two-year, unlimited data plan, $274.99 with one-year and $444.99 with no contract.


Cingular