As we reported in our May issue, portable, handheld devices (i.e. tablets, PDAs and Palms and image-enabled cell phones) are become increasingly applicable within healthcare. They have the potential to send image studies to and fro, as well as other uses for physicians or other medical professionals such as checking email, or accessing to important patient information at the point of care.

If all of this excites you, then you’ll rejoice that another nifty handheld device was announced this week from Palm Inc. called the Treo 700p smartphone. This device, the company said, is designed to combine mobile phone-like usability with high-speed wireless data access to web, email, business and multimedia applications.

This new Palm device includes a number of differentiating features from previous Treo releases. One in particular that could have application in radiology is its fast data connection that is supposed to speed email, messaging and large attachment downloads, improving web browsing, streaming multimedia content, and other media. The 700p also can provide broadband-like download speeds on their laptop computers by using the new smartphone as a wireless modem via USB or Bluetooth wireless technology. Also, the device includes a new voice-memo application that can be used to create annotations to pictures or simply record a memo.

Some other interesting features, among others:

• A 1.3-megapixel camera and camcorder, offering four times the resolution of a VGA camera;
• Like listening to music while you read images? Well, the Treo 700p includes Pocket Tunes from NormSoft Inc. for playing music files;
• Smarter, faster web browsing using a new and improved version of the award-winning Blazer browser; and
• Full PDF support using DataViz Documents To Go Version 8.0, which also offers native support for Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint;
• 128MB of memory (60MB user available); and
• Improved email and messaging, including better Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 ActiveSync support.