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We know for sure Palm plans to introduce a new smartphone for Europe tomorrow: The company says as much on its European Web site, as we reported last week. It may not be a GSM version of the Centro, which will soon be offered by Sprint in the U.S. for its CDMA network, as many originally thought, however. It turns out the likeliest candidate is a nearly altogether different model, the Treo 500. Here's what we think we know now: Like Sprint's Centro, the Treo 500 will be based on Palm's Gandolf design. But unlike that smartphone, it will run on Windows Mobile 6 Standard rather than Palm OS Garnet. If this is accurate, then the Treo 500 would be Palm's first smartphone model sans a touch screen. The display is said to run at a 240 x 320 pixel (QVGA) resolution. A leaked advertisement (see image) that's been making the rounds through the Internet rumor mill shows a Treo 500 with a Vodafone logo plastered on the front, making the carrier-giant the likeliest candidate to offer the new smartphone. It is almost certain that the Treo 500 will support 3G (UTMS/HSPDA) cellular-data networking. Possible additional features include 64MB or 150MB of RAM, 256MB of ROM, a 2 megapixel camera, microSD expansion, and a full QWERTY thumb-keyboard. Like Centro the Treo 500, at 4.3 x 2.4 x 0.24 inches (110 x 61 x 0.6 millimeters), is supposed to be tiny when compared to previous Palm smartphones. For example, it is around 25 percent thinner than the Palm's current compact king, the Treo 750.
There's little else to say about the Treo 500 right now. We'll bring you all the official details, we hope, tomorrow.
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