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Verizon Wireless indicated it would launch palmOne's Treo 650 'soon' early last month. The communicator is still a no show for the second largest carrier in the United States (with 45.5 million subscribers), however.

Phone Arena reports Verizon's 'soon' may finally be just around the corner. It said the operator's business channels should roll out the Treo 650 on May 11th with consumer customers gaining access to the smartphone 12 days later.

Verizon would sell the Treo 650 for around $400 with a 2-year service agreement and $450 for a single year of service. No contract gets you the Treo 650 for $530.

Money Matters
It has been over six months since CDMA competitor Sprint became the first operator to deliver the Treo 650. Since then, number one operator Cingular Wireless has begun selling the communicator for its high-speed GSM/GPRS EDGE network and even ISP Earthlink entered the Treo 650 fray.

Undoubtedly palmOne is chomping at the bit to gain access to Verizon's millions of customers. The Treo 650 is a member of the most popular smartphone series in the U.S. and is the mobile device company's flagship product. Verizon adding the smartphone could only help but boost palmOne's seemingly shaky position in the handheld industry.

Although the company reported slightly better than expected pro forma earnings in March, it slashed forward guidance way bellow expectations—sending its stock into a tailspin. A month earlier, Gartner revealed that palmOne's 2004 revenue declined by 9.4 percent and its market share slipped to 19.3 percent, down from 24.9 percent the previous year.

The decline of PalmSource's top licensee’s shipments also translated into the Palm platform losing its crown as the leading PDA OS. Its share of the PDA OS market dropped to only 36.3 percent in 2004 from 50 percent in 2003.

The Future?
With smartphones set to dominate handheld sales in the near future, a report last Fall by ABI Research puts another fly in Palm's ointment. The research firm predicted that leading smartphone platform provider Symbian's share of the worldwide wireless phone OS market would hit 50 percent by 2009, with most of the rest of the market being seized by Microsoft with Windows Mobile.

With Symbian and Microsoft battling it out for the lion’s share of the smartphone market that leaves Palm and others fighting over the leftovers. Of course, the scraps may still be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

And then there's wild card Research In Motion, which has been going gangbusters of late with its BlackBerry devices and push-based e-mail and data access solutions. Some predict RIM could soon become the top-selling handheld company.

More on Treo 650
Although not a reinvention of Verizon's aging Treo 600, the Treo 650 fixes some weaknesses of the earlier model while adding some nice new features, including an improved keyboard, high-resolution screen, e-mail, PIM functionality, Web browser, and phone capabilities.

The smartphone measures 4.4 x 2.3 x 0.9 inches, weighs about 6.3 ounces, and has an overall appearance similar to the Treo 600's. Treo 650's QWERTY thumb-keyboard has a backlight and a more user-friendly design than the previous model, however. Like the earlier model, there is a Secure Digital slot for peripheral and memory expansion.

Unlike the Treo 600 and its 160 x 160 screen the Treo 650 implements a high-resolution 320 x 320 display, which makes it easier to read documents and Web pages. The Treo 650 also integrates Bluetooth—a glaring omission in the previous model.

As with the Treo 600, the Treo 650 includes a VGA camera for 640 x 480 or 352 x 288 pixel images. The Treo 650's camera is better, however, with improved picture and video taking in low-light situations. With the Treo 650, you also get a 312 MHz Intel XScale PXA270 processor and twice the memory, 32MB, of the Treo 600. As with palmOne's Tungsten T5 and new Tungsten E2, the memory is non-volatile, which means you won't lose your data in the event of a power drain.

Unlike the Treo 600's battery, the Treo 650's is removable. So you can carry an extra battery (sold separately), and swap it out for additional power on the fly.

For more on the CDMA version of the Treo 650, see Review: palmOne Treo 650 - A Near Perfect Hybrid, where we review the Sprint edition of the smartphone.