Palm launches smartphone Treo 750

Global smartphone provider Palm announced the launch of the Palm Treo 750 smartphone in India on Tuesday. Until now, Palm devices were imported in the country.

The Treo smartphone will be introduced on Airtel's network and Palm officials claim it was an exclusive deal with the service provider and retailed around Rs 27,000. The phone comes bundled with free unlimited data usage for a month and the Palm wireless keyboard with Bluetooth technology.

Sharon Ee, head of business for Palm in south Asia, , said, "Smartphones have a 4.7 per cent share of the mobile handset market in India (roughly around 9-10 million units) and are expected to touch 9.5 per cent by 2011.

Palm wanted to be a part of the success story and hence our launch in India with partners like Airtel."

Rubbishing media reports claiming that Motorola and Nokia were interested in buying Palm, Ee said, "Having sold over 5 million Treo smartphones, we are eager to take share away from the existing players such as Nokia, Blackberry, and High Tech Corporation. "

The company has plans to launch new smartphone devices for the Indian market in the next few months.

Globally, the smartphone pioneer has been struggling to find a stable footing amid rising competition from its peers. Palm has been pummelled by deep-pocketed rivals and remains shackled to an ageing operating system.

Ee also confirmed that Palm will be announcing new operating system based on Linux, but it's a huge undertaking and nobody knows yet how it will stack up. In fact, the company recently cancelled its much maligned Foleo, a laptop-like gadget, to shift resources to the next-generation platform.

As competitors trotted out sleek new smart phones over the past year, Palm veered little from the once-beloved but now-bulky design of the Treo 600, which debuted in 2003. Others adopted software platforms aimed at today's multimedia culture, but Palm has been relying mainly on an operating system that has seen only minor revisions over five years.