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Due to Europe's Reduction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) pollution legislation, which went into effect on July 1st, Palm, Inc. has decided not to ship anymore Treo 650s in the European Union. RoHS sets limits on the amount of hazardous substances (lead, cadmium, mercury, hexavalent chromium, PBB and PBDE flame retardants) contained within electronic equipment. Rather than updating the increasingly long-in-the-tooth Treo to comply, Palm has chosen to stop shipping its only smartphone available in Europe.

Palm believes operators and suppliers on the continent have enough Treo 650s in stock to hold them over until it can release its next-generation smartphones there. These models aren't expected until the second quarter of Palm's current fiscal year, however, which runs from October through the December timeframe.

So Palm could run into trouble, in a market it is already struggling to gain traction in, should Treo 650s start to disappear before the new ones arrive.

In Europe, smartphones built on the Symbian platform dominate (mostly Nokia devices), RIM's BlackBerry handhelds came in second and Windows Mobile handsets (with no Treo 700w in the market, you can't count Palm here) are doing well, according to April statistics from Canalys.

Treo's are the most popular consumer-orientated handhelds in the U.S., nonetheless. And that's where the handheld-maker has concentrated efforts so far this year. Its most recent models, the Treo 700p and Treo 700w, are only available from CDMA carriers (Verizon both and Sprint the 700p only) in the States with their high-speed EV-DO networks.

European operators, like the majority of others around the world, use GSM-cellular and UTMS broadband technologies.

There are those who have questioned the wisdom of focusing so much on the already successful American market to the exclusion of advancing Europe, where Palm hasn't released a new product in a very long time. Why couldn’t the company release a CDMA and GSM version of the new Treos at the same time?

Smartphones Rumors Say
Palm committed to releasing several new smartphones this year, with - possibly - a couple more still due before the end of 2006. Recent rumors indicate two of them could be aimed at Europe as well as GSM carriers like Cingular in the U.S.

One of these new smartphones is presumably codenamed Nitro and the other Lennon. Both models supposedly lack an antenna, which would be Palm's biggest deviation from Treo design since the unveiling of the Treo 600.

Reportedly Lennon delivers the 3G goods with UMTS technology. It is also a Windows Mobile Pocket PC Phone, like the Treo 700w, and may ship with software client support Microsoft Messaging and Security Feature Pack for Exchange, which delivers push e-mail to the device.

All that appears to be known about Nitro is that it may run the Palm OS and it sports a 1.3 megapixel camera. It may be a less expensive device as well.

Building Palm's European House
Even though Palm hasn't released any new GSM Treos yet and because the smartphones are far more popular in North America than most other regions, Palm CEO Ed Colliigan re-emphasized the company's plans to expand to other markets earlier this year by saying Europe would be the company's next major target region. He added Palm would launch more products this year tuned to global demand.

During October of last year, Palm opened a Research and Development Center in Dublin, Ireland to create custom Treo applications for mobile operators in the European, Middle Eastern and African (EMEA) regions with that very purposes in mind. Due to the differences in global wireless-communications systems, Palm said it believed mobile solutions are best delivered with targeted R&D activities and close collaboration with European mobile operators.

Colligan explained at the time, the European center was "a significant step up for our R&D function." He added, "This move reflects our intention to accelerate the delivery of next-generation smartphones to European mobile operators and their customers."