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Vodafone's Treo 750 Web site now says the price range of the Palm smartphone will be free to £212.77 (about $270) when the carrier-giant releases it at the end of the month. This jibes with indications from Palm that when launched the GSM-enabled 750v will be able to be had for nothing with a data plan, and, likely, an extended service contract during its financial call yesterday.

Inaugural launch countries for the Treo 750v over the next several weeks will include Austria, England, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland, after which Vodafone plans to expand deployment to other regions.

Vodafone's pricing raises the tantalizing possibility that when a version of the 3G-enabled 750 hits these shores, it'll go for considerably less than the $400 range other recent Treo models - like the 700w, 700p, and 700wx - initially shipped for here. You may be able to pick it up for $200 or, if American carriers (Cingular then possibly T-Mobile) are willing to subsidize the cost as much as Vodafone, free like our European counterparts.

Much has been written and said about how the 750v is part of Palm's push back into the international spotlight. The company has been faulted for only concentrating on the American market for its smartphones, where sales are still strong but diminishing due to competition.

Palm said it is going to run a $25 million marketing campaign to help launch the new Treo in Europe. In addition, Vodafone, of course, and Microsoft – the 750v runs on the Windows Mobile 5.0 platform - will heavily promote the smartphone.

Around 2 billion of the world's 2.3 billion wireless subscribers use GSM networks, with most of the rest leveraging the competing CDMA standard. In the U.S., Palm just launched the Treo 700wx, a slightly more refined version of the Verizon’s 700w- with more memory as well - on Sprint. The company said it plans to roll that device out to other CDMA carriers around the world.

And then there's the promised low-end Treo (code-named Nitro) we've been hearing about for a long time. This model, for the mass market, is supposed to be built on the Palm OS and have a VGA camera, 64 MB of RAM and an SD slot. Palm CEO Ed Colligan said during the conference call that this device would be released in the near future, with worldwide distribution by over 20 operators before the end of 2006. Not much compared to RIM, but it’s a start.

As for handhelds, this could end up being the first year since the introduction of the original Palm PDA that the company doesn't release a new model. While the PDA market has diminished greatly, the company still leads when it comes to those that don't feature cellular-wireless capabilities.

PDAs are still a money maker for the company, and yet Palm may nonetheless let them slip away through neglect. There are plenty of people, especially in the U.S., who don't buy into the all-in-one device solution of smartphones. They still prefer keep their life and business organized separate from where they make their phone calls.

$87 million of Palm's $355 million in revenue from the second quarter came from handhelds, with 76 percent or $269 million having resulted from Treo sales.

Total revenue grew by 4 percent from the $342 million reported during the same period a year earlier.

Net income for the quarter was $16.5 million or 16 cents per share, down from last year's 18.2 million or 18 cents per share.

Palm forecasts revenue between $430 million to $450 million and earnings of 15 cents to 18 cents per share for its next reported quarter.

The company's board also approved a $250 million stock repurchase program.