In a rare blunder, the company leaked a Flash presentation describing its shrewdly updated smartphone to the Web.

For several minutes on Thursday, Palm mistakenly posted an entire Flash presentation about its new Treo Pro, almost a week before the company's planned official announcement, and after rumors had circulated for months about a potential Treo 850.

The gloss-black Treo Pro appears to be a cutting-edge, competitive Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional handset, taking many of the best qualities of the HP iPAQ 910, the Motorola Q9c, and the BlackBerry 8800 series. The Treo Pro cuts a form factor that's significantly thinner than past Treos (0.55 inches, versus 0.73 inches for the Treo 800w). It also ditches the proprietary connectors and oddball controls that plagued the company's earlier devices.

The Treo Pro's most obvious asset, aside from its newfound thinness, is its 2.4-inch, 320-by-320 touchscreen LCD. It's completely flush to the body, giving the handset a much sleeker appearance than the Treo 800w the company released just last month. That puts it on par with the unlocked HP iPAQ 910 and gives it a leg up over the aforementioned Q9 series and 8800 series handsets, both of which lack touch screens.

The Treo Pro has a 400-MHz CPU-a modest improvement over recent Palm devices with 312- and 333-MHz chips-along with 256MB of ROM and 128MB of RAM, which is a necessity for decent Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional performance. The Treo Pro sports a full compliment of radio connectivity, including quad-band GSM, tri-band 3G HSDPA 3.6 data, a GPS chipset, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR. Palm has ditched its much-maligned proprietary jack in favor of a microUSB connector and a standard 3.5-mm headphone jack. Other improvements are more mundane, but still welcome. Palm also appears to have ditched the curved plastic keyboard of the original Treo, instead going with a straight, four-row, Centro-style QWERTY arrangement that's a bit roomier. There's a 2-megapixel camera, a hardwire Wi-Fi switch, an IR port, and a soft reset button underneath the back panel. There's also a microSD slot-underneath the battery cover, but not underneath the battery-that the company says can support up to 32GB cards (which aren't widely available yet).

Software-wise, the presentation showed the Treo Pro sporting TeleNav-based GPS software with a series of square icons for calling up places of interest, including coffee shops, banks, ATMs, hotels, parking lots, and gas stations sorted by price. Palm also placed a Running Programs icon on the home page-similar to HTC's Task Manager-that should make quick work of quitting stubborn threads in Windows Mobile.

Palm has yet to announce an official on-sale date or price, but that's probably because the company hasn't officially announced the actual handset yet. The Flash presentation also lacked carrier information, but AT&T and T-Mobile are both possibilities now that T-Mobile has finally begun its 3G data network rollout.

Two potential concerns are battery life and a balky touch screen. In our review, the Sprint Treo 800w only lasted just over three hours on a talk time rundown test, and HSDPA handsets are known for draining the battery even faster than EV-DO. But two factors lean in the Treo Pro's favor: the battery appears to make up in length what it lacks in depth, and its listed capacity is an impressive 1500 mAh. No word on whether or not Palm improved Windows Mobile's notoriously obstinate touchscreen response.

For plenty of photos, check out PHONE magazine's spread {http://www.phonemag.com/palm-treo-pro-live-photos-more-spec-details-084221.php}, originally taken from a Chinese phone forum.