• The New York Times, Wednesday, August 20, 2008 10:45 AM

Palm will announce today the debut of a new smart phone primarily for business customers called the Treo Pro. It is slimmer and more elegant than current models, and its larger keyboard and screen that is flush with the phone's chassis make it more user-friendly than Palm's old calculator-like design.

Palm's share of the smartphone market has been halved to about 16.9% over the last two years. Executive chairman Jon Rubinstein, who led the Apple hardware engineering division that developed the iMac and iPod, is convinced that he can bring Palm back. "Everyone is trying to make an iPhone killer," he says. "We are trying to make a killer Palm product." The real test will come in the first half of next year when Palm plans to announce a next generation of software -- and a new device -- that it hopes will make it easier for consumers to surf the Web and network.

Palm also has begun to market its products differently. With the $99 Centro, for example, it focused on women and college-age consumers who were upgrading from a regular mobile phone to a "starter" smartphone with e-mail and simple Web browsing. Palm sold two million Centros in eight months.

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