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Five people gather for a meal at a restaurant in Europe. What do they do? Besides greet each other, order drinks and say hello; sneak a peak at each other's cell phones, which have been strategically placed on the table ... and then pass judgment. Not just on the make and model of the handset, but on the person that carries it, according to former Palm executive and PalmSource Chief Competitive Officer Michael Mace, now a conuslatant and blogger, in a post about the Treo's chances in the European market.

Mace says:

Go to lunch or dinner in any country in Europe, and when everyone sits down they'll take out their mobile phones and put them on the table.

Then everyone at the table surreptitiously checks out everyone else's phone. There's a subtle hierarchy of status associated with which phone you carry. I haven't decoded all of it yet, but definitely you get some extra status for having what's perceived to be a stylish phone. Brand also plays a role, although I think that varies from country to country.

(Here we learn that Siemens is OK in Germany but on elsewhere; Nokia is good, depending on the model; Sony Ericsson is a creative choice; and Motorola marks you as an American.)

And then there's the Treo. I've been told by several European friends that slapping down a Treo on the table gets you labeled as a geek. And not a nice geek in the American sense (visionary and probably rich), but geek in the bad sense (socially misfit and physically underdeveloped). The keyboard, which American users tend to regard as a badge of business power and importance, comes across as pathetically computer-obsessed to a lot of folks in Europe. At least that's what I've been told by people over there.

Not a very hopeful sign for a company just recovering from having to pull its last model, the Treo 650, from the European Union due to the Reduction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) pollution law, which 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 chose to stop shipping its only smartphone available in Europe.

Mace notes, however, that the growing popularity of keyboard-based BlackBerrys from RIM and the introduction of similar communicator-class devices like the E61 from Nokia could help the Treo shake this geeky reputation.

Palm and carrier-giant Vodafone officially introduced a new Treo, the 750v, on September 12th (see Palm, Vodafone Unwrap Treo 750v). This model, while a great improvement over the 650, with high-speed UMTS 3G for GSM networks (for example), is a Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC Phone (see full list of known features). This raises another question mark for Mace.

Sure Windows Mobile is growing in popularity as a smartphone platform, but that makes the field of devices built on it already fairly congested. This, in turn, makes it harder for a company like Palm to differentate itself.

"Palm sold huge numbers of handhelds into Europe, especially Germany, and I'm sure some of those people would trade up to a well-designed 3G phone using the same OS. I'm less certain of the demand for a Windows Mobile Treo in Europe. There are already a lot Windows Mobile devices on the market there, so Palm is entering a crowded field," Mace writes.

As has been pointed out by Mace and others before, Palm has yet to release a GSM Treo using the Palm OS with 3G technology; the type used in most of the rest of the world, for example, and by carriers like Cingular in the U.S.

And there's still a question as to whether the handheld vendor can even pull of that feat of enabling GSM 3G with the Palm platform, period. The Palm OS may be too dated.

Also, a few weeks ago Palm revealed PalmSource failed to meet certain milestones as per a co-development agreement the companies signed to renew the Palm OS license. As a result, Palm is now relieved of its obligation to make minimum royalty payments to PalmSource, which also raises questions about its ability to deliver a version of the ACCESS Linux Platform (ALP) - the sequel to the Palm OS with some of the current platform's characteristics - to Palm in time for the handheld-maker to effectively compete and differentiate itself in the GSM/3G market.

At the time Palm revealed PalmSource's delivery failure, it also said the companies were working together on a Linux-based new mobile OS. But it didn't say if that Linux OS was ALP.

If the mobile OS in question was ALP, Palm could conceivably call its version the next-generation Palm OS 6 should it choose to, since it now owns the Palm brand exlusively after buying rights to it from PalmSource back in May 2005.

In addition, PalmSource gives Palm the capability to make ALP look enough like the Palm OS so that changeover wouldn’t be too jarring to customers.

Recently, the platform developer said it was on schedule to get the new OS in the hands of licensees by the end of the year. Devices aren’t expected until spring 2007, at the earliest, probably later.

Or, as Mace continues to speculate (and others have before), maybe Palm is working on its own Linux-based OS, or, perhaps, something altogether different.

The handheld maker does have a clandestine third-stream device in the works. While Palm won’t say exactly what kind of product it is, it makes no secret about the fact that it is indeed doing it and that the device is neither PDA or smartphone. Palm founder Jeff Hawkins (today a consultant for new products), had this to say about the ultra-secret project one year ago in the Portland Business Journal:

I always think of mobile computing as personal computing. This long-term vision has led us through everything—first the organizers and now through the smart phone space. It's like everything a personal computer is. Continue down that path. What are the implications of a world where everyone has a super high-speed Internet connection in their pocket and many gigabytes of storage, super-fast processors, audio, visual and multimedia? What are the consequences of that? How will that change computing when you have all that stuff available to you all the time? I try to think into the future. That's how we come up with new products. So I'm not going to tell you what it is, but it's following the consequences of mobile computing.

Whatever the device turns out to be, perhaps Palm is developing an OS for it that'll eventually find its way into the company's handhelds? If so, the Palm would come full circle. As Mace concludes, "The company would be back under the management of its founders, owning its brand name, and with its own proprietary OS.