Palm's Treo Pro Ready for Business

Back when Apple's (AAPL Quote - Cramer on AAPL - Stock Picks) iPhone and most other modern-day cellular devices were merely a gleam in their designers' eyes, a company called Handspring melded its PDA technology with a cell phone to create the Treo. They called it a smartphone because of all the smart things it could do. Smart Phones Photo gallery

Handspring is no more; the company, started by the founders of Palm (PALM Quote - Cramer on PALM - Stock Picks), was eventually sold to Palm. The Treo, however, lives on. It has since slowly evolved into the new Treo Pro.

Taking cues from its wildly successful small Centro phone, Palm's shiny black Treo Pro is slimmer and sleeker than its predecessors but loaded with nearly every modern-day smartphone feature you could think of.

Palm Gets Down to Business With Treo Pro

The phone seems to be sculpted from the now ubiquitous Centro/Treo form factor, but it's larger than the Centro at 4.69 ounces and with dimensions of 2.36" wide by 4.49" long and 0.53" deep. However, because the Treo Pro's beautiful 320x320-pixel thin film transistor (TFT) screen (a type of LCD display) is flush with the case, it's not as large as it may appear.

Treo Pro is a quad-band GSM world phone that uses tri-band UMTS/HSDPA cellular technology. It should work everywhere on the planet where there's a signal. It's got 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0 and GPS built inside. That's a lot of radio receivers in a small package.

The device also contains a 2-megapixel camera (stills and video), a microSDHC memory card slot, a 3.5mm stereo headphone jack and a tiny microUSB sync/charging port. I prefer the larger miniUSB connectors -- but I understand these new little ones take up less real estate on small, portable devices. MicroUSBs are rapidly becoming the industry standard. The removable, rechargeable battery pack is said to be good for up to five hours of talk time and 250 hours of standby.

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