World Speed Typing Record Set on Treo 650

To celebrate the UK launch of the palmOne Treo 650 smartphone, former World Text Champion Arttu Harkki has exchanged his mobile phone for a palmOne smartphone, to type the fastest-ever email on the move using a QWERTY keyboard.

Arttu Harkki of Finland set the Guinness World Record for texting in 2001. Today, he used the Treo 650’s full QWERTY keypad to complete the message in just 2 minutes 22.9 seconds. In keeping with the theme of communications, Arttu typed a fitting email:

“The telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell (UK), who filed his patent for the telephone on 14 February 1876 at the New York Patent Office, USA. The first intelligible call occurred in March 1876 in Boston, Massachusetts, when Bell phoned his assistant in a nearby room and said 'Come here Watson, I want you.'”

Hein Le Roux, official adjudicator from Guinness World Records, said, “There are a lot of phones that incorporate QWERTY keyboards, and we need to make sure that the record is standard across all models. For this reason, we asked Arttu Harkki to type using just the thumb of one hand.”

Leading telecoms analysts forecast that 40% of people with a business mobile phone will use mobile email by 2008 (source: Analysys Research, 2003). The Treo 650 makes this forecast a reality, by making mobile email a simple solution for everyone, from large corporations to those with individual POP3 accounts. In addition to this, the Treo 650 incorporates a quad band phone with full SMS capabilities, web access and enough memory to host a wealth of applications from GPS to multilingual dictionaries.

François Bornibus, vice president for palmOne EMEA, said, “The new Treo 650 allows users to quickly and easily set up their email. Many ISP settings are pre-programmed on the phone – which means you can be up and running in minutes, making mobile email easily accessible.”

About the Treo 650
With Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, Memos and more, the Treo 650 lets users organize and simplify their business and personal lives all in one place. Users can dial contacts by name from their contacts list or enter a name or number on the QWERTY keyboard or on-screen dial pad. Speakerphone, speed dial, conference calling, call history, and caller ID make managing calls that much easier. The Treo 650 brings corporate email and productivity applications to mobile professionals, and combines a full-featured quad-band mobile phone, a Palm OS organizer, messaging and web access functionality within a compact form factor.

The Treo 650 runs Palm OS Garnet v5.4 on a 312 MHz Intel PXA270 processor. It includes 32MB of non-volatile Flash RAM (of which ~23 MB is user accessible), that will stay preserved even when not charged or the battery is removed. It has dimensions of 4.4 x 2.3 x 0.9 inches (11.3 x 5.9 x 2.3 cm) and weighs 6.3 ounces (178 grams). The screen is a very sharp 320x320 pixel high resolution 65,000 color TFT touch-screen display that offers improved visibility in sunlight. It also adds an improved camera, integrated Bluetooth wireless, a removable battery and non-volatile memory.