Palm and RIM today announced that they are working together to bring BlackBerry Connect to the Palm Treo 650 smartphone. The companies expect the solution to be available in the United States and internationally starting in early calendar 2006.

Through RIM's BlackBerry Connect licensing program, Palm will enable its Treo 650 and future Palm OS based Treo smartphones with secure, push-based wireless email via BlackBerry Enterprise Server. The solution will enable the following:

• push-based email using BlackBerry Connect with Palm's VersaMail email client;
• support for Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Domino;
• wireless calendar synchronization;
• remote address lookup of corporate email directory;
• convenient email-attachment viewing;
• Triple DES encryption; and
• IT policy enforcement and commands (such as remotely disabling or wiping email and PIM data from a device in the event it is lost or stolen).

The Treo 650 with BlackBerry Connect is being demonstrated this week at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2005 in Orlando, Fla.