Palm announces Treo 700wx, a Sprint exclusive

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Finally Palm has announced that the Treo 700wx will be available in exclusive to Sprint customers. We say finally because in the last weekend there was some buzz and we got some interesting details and even some pictures of the gadget but no official word from Palm or Sprint.

The Treo 700wx is the obvious successor of the Treo 700w that is distributed exclusively by Verizon Wireless since last January. The main difference between the two gadgets is the amount of memory available to the user applications.

A slowdown of the OS with several applications open was too much frequent and it’s great to know that Palm covered the most serious lack of the first Treo equipped with the Windows Mobile OS. The Treo 700wx (also powered by the Microsoft OS) more than doubles the RAM with its 57 MB against the 25 MB provided by the Verizon’s smartphone.

The smartphone is powered by a 312MHz Intel XScale processor that runs a Windows Mobile 5.1 Pocket PC Phone Edition OS. The Treo 700wx has a 240 x 240 pixel 65,000-color LCD and it’s extremely compact for a Treo (4.4 x 2.3 x 0.9 inch and only 180 grams of weight).

Other important features are the expansion card slot (supports MultiMediaCard, SD and SDIO cards) and a 1.3 megapixel camera with digital zoom and video capture. The most used features though will be phoning and browsing and the Treo 700wx seems up to the task in both areas.

As for the phoning it runs on the Spring CDMA network using the 800 and 1900 MHz bands and offers good audio quality even in low receptions areas. The gadget uses the EVDO standard to offer a high-speed connection to browse and send and receive e-mail thanks to the included Microsoft Security and Messaging Feature Pack (useful also to interact with Exchange 2003).

Lastly the Treo 700wx comes with Bluetooth 1.2 and Infrared support and according to Palm the lithium-ion battery guarantees 5 hours of talk time or almost a week of standby time. It will be priced at 499 US dollars if you sign a 2 year contract while it costs 650 US dollars without a service agreement.