Palm today announced the Palm Treo 680 smartphone, a GSM/GPRS/EDGE quad-band world phone. In the coming weeks and months, carriers around the world will announce additional product details, availability and exact pricing. Palm believes this product will appeal to price-sensitive feature-phone owners who want a more capable mobile-computing device.

Palm's U.S. retail and online stores will sell exclusively an unlocked GSM version in four new cool colors - crimson, copper, arctic and graphite. For a limited time, they will come complete with a music bundle from Yahoo!, which includes a 30-day free trial to its music service. With Yahoo! Music Unlimited, users have access to more than 1 million songs to take with them anywhere.

"The Treo 680 is the smartphone for everyone. It's small, sleek, fast and comes in a variety of fun colors," said Ed Colligan, president and chief executive officer of Palm, Inc. "It's a great phone design, great for messaging and email, and provides users easy and fast access to the Internet and to their favorite music and pictures, and makes it easy for people to manage and balance their business and personal lives while on the go."

The Treo 680 smartphone has an internal antenna and slim form factor, making the device smaller and sleeker than its Treo predecessors in the United States. It has a full, easy-type keyboard, perfect for writing SMS messages and emails, and an optimal 320x320 vibrant color screen for viewing web pages, photos, media and more.

The Treo 680 smartphone has a unique phone user interface that further simplifies Treo innovations, such as the ability to respond to calls with a preset text message and add new phone numbers to existing contact information, and three-way calling. The Treo 680 also has integrated email and web capabilities, so users can stay in touch with colleagues and friends. The messaging application on the Treo 680 displays text-messaging conversations as "threaded chats", similar to IM, so users can see their entire conversation with a particular person. The Treo 680 smartphone also can be used as an MP3 player and has an integrated digital camera, camcorder and video player.

The Treo 680 smartphone offers many additional features, including the following:

• Added memory: The Treo 680 smartphone includes 64MB of user-available storage, nearly three times the memory of the original Treo 650 smartphone. Customers can add up to 2GB of storage with expansion cards for those large music or video files
• Enhanced email and messaging: Exchange ActiveSync will now synchronize not only calendar and email, but contacts as well; SMS and MMS capabilities have been improved for a better user experience;
• Improved web browser: The Blazer 4.5 browser is superfast due to its smarter caching rules and includes alternate modes for viewing web pages optimized for the device or as a regular web page;
• Enhanced multimedia: Customers can use the Treo 680 smartphone to stream music, play MP3s and manage and share photo albums;
• Built-in dial-up networking (DUN) capabilities: Customers can use the new smartphone as a wireless modem via Bluetooth(R) wireless technology to connect to a compatible Bluetooth enabled laptop;
• Documents To Go: Customers can view, edit and share Microsoft Word and Excel documents on their Treo 680 smartphones in addition to viewing full-featured Adobe PDF files and Microsoft PowerPoint presentations; and
• Bluetooth 1.2: Customers can connect wirelessly to other Bluetooth enabled devices. The Treo 680 has improved car-kit and headset support, and support for multiple simultaneous Bluetooth connections.

The Treo 680 should be price about $199 in most carrier.