For people who are ready to move up to a full-featured mobile phone that includes everything needed to stay organized, Palm, Inc. (Nasdaq:PALM) has announced the availability of the Palm(R) Treo(TM) 680 smartphone, a GSM/GPRS/EDGE quad-band world phone, on Rogers Wireless, Canada’s largest integrated wireless voice and data network.

Customers will find the Treo 680 smartphone easy to use, slim and compact, yet packed full of features beyond its stellar phone capability, such as email, web browsing, messaging, multimedia, calendar, contacts and more. Palm believes this product will appeal to price-sensitive feature-phone owners who want a more capable mobile-computing device.

“The Treo 680 is the smartphone for everyone. It’s small, sleek, fast and is available in four fun colors on the Palm Canada online store,” said Michael Moskowitz, vice president, Americas International, Palm, Inc. “It’s a great phone design for messaging and email, and provides users easy and fast access to the Internet and to their favorite music and pictures. The Treo 680 makes it easy for people to balance their business and personal lives while on the go.”

“As Canada’s leading wireless carrier, operating on Canada’s only GSM network, we are proud to offer our customers leading-edge mobile devices like the Palm Treo 680. Email availability on a stylish, thin form factor will make the Treo 680 particularly appealing to small and medium-size businesses by enabling them to save time by having access to outstanding mobile innovation and email connectivity,” said John Boynton, senior vice president and chief marketing officer, Rogers Wireless.

With the introduction of the Palm OS(R) based Treo 680 smartphone, Palm is targeting new users in the rapidly growing smartphone and feature-phone markets. Market research firm In-Stat, estimates that 25 per cent of all wireless handsets worldwide will be smartphones by 2011. Research conducted by Palm suggests a substantial population of feature-phone users have not purchased smartphones, fearing they were too expensive and too difficult to use. The Treo 680 will offer an affordable, simple and fun way to get started and stay connected.

Rogers Wireless (TSX: RCI; NYSE: RG) and Research In Motion (RIM) (Nasdaq: RIMM; TSX: RIM) today introduced the new, sleek BlackBerryВ® 7130gв„ў — the perfect handset for people who want to stay in touch with both work and life. The BlackBerry 7130g operates on Rogers Wireless’ GSM/GPRS/EDGE network, Canada’s largest high-speed wireless data network, and delivers an exceptional voice, email and browsing experience in a sleek business phone design. The BlackBerry 7130g is available from Rogers Wireless for as low as $249.99.

The BlackBerry 7130g allows users to stay connected with a full-featured phone and integrated wireless high-speed access to email, text messaging, Internet, organizer and other data applications. It provides the look and feel of a traditional mobile phone by incorporating RIM’s popular SureType™ technology which effectively converges a telephone keypad and a QWERTY keyboard to attain a narrower design.

“Rogers Wireless is proud to bring Canadians the BlackBerry 7130g, building on our industry leading line-up of mobile communication devices,” said John Boynton, Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer. “The BlackBerry 7130g leverages the popular and proven BlackBerry platform to deliver a best-in-class wireless email, voice and data experience, providing mobile professionals with the freedom to remain connected, regardless of location. Our business and individual customers are extraordinarily busy people, and with the BlackBerry 7130g they will have the latest in mobile communications to help them save time.”

“RIM and Rogers Wireless have enjoyed a long history of bringing compelling, feature rich BlackBerry solutions to customers,” said Don Morrison, Chief Operating Officer at Research In Motion. “The introduction of the BlackBerry 7130g on Rogers’ high speed EDGE network further demonstrates our commitment to providing an outstanding user experience to customers who want a great phone together with advanced data features in a sleek and attractive handset.”

Boasting a completely re-engineered BlackBerry device platform that features a powerful Intel® processor and 64 MB flash memory, the BlackBerry 7130g is optimized for breakthrough performance and usability on Rogers’ high-speed EDGE network, delivering a highly responsive experience for web browsing and application performance. In addition, Rogers’ customers can roam in 80 countries.

The BlackBerry 7130g also delivers premium phone features including smart dialing, conference calling, speed dial, call forwarding, polyphonic and MP3 ring tones, as well as speakerphone and BluetoothВ® to allow support for a broad range of wireless headsets and car kits.

The brilliant, high-resolution 240 x 260 color LCD screen supports more than 65,000 colours and utilizes active matrix transmissive technology to deliver vivid graphics and exceptional readability in different environments. The display incorporates intelligent light sensing technology that automatically adjusts both the LCD and keyboard lighting to provide an optimized view in outdoor, indoor and dark environments.

The BlackBerry 7130g is being introduced along with the newly enhanced BlackBerry Internet Service™. With BlackBerry Internet Service, users enjoy tighter integration and wireless synchronization with their email accounts, including easier set-up, real-time delivery of e-mail messages sent to their Yahoo! Mail and Rogers.com accounts and the ability to use multiple “sent from” addresses. For individuals and smaller businesses, BlackBerry Internet Service allows customers to access up to ten corporate and personal email accounts (including Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Domino and most popular ISP e-mail accounts) from a single device.

For corporate customers, BlackBerry Enterprise Serverв„ў software tightly integrates with MicrosoftВ® Exchange, IBM LotusВ® DominoВ® and NovellВ® GroupWiseВ® and works with existing enterprise systems to enable secure, push-based, wireless access to email and other corporate data.

The worldwide movement by operators to deploy high speed mobile broadband services – based on the global W-CDMA and HSDPA technology standards – is fuelling unprecedented economies of scale in the supply of equipment for carriers and handsets for consumers, said the GSM Association (GSMA) today.

According to the GSMA, the global trade organisation for the mobile industry, more than 105 mobile networks have launched commercial W-CDMA networks across 50 countries so far. Following the world’s first large scale commercial launch of HSDPA – the next evolution of W-CDMA – by Cingular Wireless last year in the US, more than 95 operators from 48 countries are deploying, or have announced plans to deploy the technology. Already, 18 mobile networks are providing live commercial W-CDMA/ HSDPA services in 14 countries.

Among the raft of global operator commitments, a number of networks have already announced deployment of W-CDMA/HSDPA in the 850MHz frequency band, including Cingular Wireless, Telstra in Australia and Rogers Wireless – Canada’s largest wireless voice and data communications service provider.

“Our plans to introduce a state of the art network based on the world standard for 3G wireless communications – W-CDMA – is a natural progression for Rogers’ coast-to-coast GSM/EDGE network,” said Bob Berner, CTO of Rogers Wireless. “By deploying HSDPA in the 850MHz frequency band, we will be able to better provide our customers in Canada with advanced mobile services, delivering speeds of up to 1.5 to 2 times faster than those claimed for competing technologies.”

This week, mobile operator KTF of Korea also announced that it will switch focus from its CDMA network to a new nationwide W-CDMA/ HSDPA network covering 84 South Korean cities by the end of the year. KTF has cited many compelling reasons for this shift, from simple economic efficiencies and global roaming to global handset availability and choice, economies of scale and significant potential revenue gains from high speed services.

As part of the evolutionary GSM family of technologies, W-CDMA & HSDPA will benefit from the strengths of the global GSM eco-system, such as global roaming and interoperability, open standards and huge economies of scale – evidenced through lower costs for handsets, and greater variety.

More than 315 handset products for W-CDMA are available already from the vendor community, 25 of which are HSDPA ready and a raft of new products are due for shipment in 2006.

“With more than 680 networks in our community heading along this globally agreed evolutionary path, no other technology can match the economies of scale and interoperability generated by GSM’s 1.8 billion and growing user base,” said Rob Conway, CEO and Board member of the GSM Association. “As economies of scale reach the point of critical mass for suppliers, we will see HSDPA become a ubiquitous part of device product ranges, just as GSM, GPRS and W-CDMA are today.”

The CTO of Cingular Wireless, the first network in the world to launch a large scale HSDPA network, Kris Rinne added: “Cingular is demonstrating that HSDPA is a real and robust technology that allows people on the move to enjoy high speed data and multimedia products and services. For us it was about enhancing our broad deployment of EDGE capabilities in the urban and suburban areas – and in technology terms, UMTS (W-CDMA) with HSDPA is uniquely positioned as the only 3G technology that supports both circuit switched voice and high speed packet data.”

The trend of operator migration from TDMA, CDMA and PDC to the global mobile path of GSM/GPRS/ W-CDMA & HSDPA continues – as seen across a raft of countries from Australia, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Columbia, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela, to Japan, Korea, Singapore and the US among many others in recent years. This ease of migration has been witnessed in the phenomenal growth of markets such as Brazil, which three years ago moved to the GSM family. Today GSM is the market leader, and the choice of more than 50 million users.

In terms of global footprint, the GSM world is more than six times bigger than that of the nearest competing wireless technology, with 82% share of the digital wireless market and growing, while market share for other wireless technologies continues to decline. The scale of GSM growth enables consumers to enjoy unequalled value and variety of products and services, brought to bear by a global eco-system of hundreds and thousands of suppliers, as opposed to the few serving proprietary standards.