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Starting on February 14th, Palm will make its smallest and lightest smartphone to date, Centro, available throughout Europe. Unlike the similarly designed and European-only Treo 500v, Centro runs on the Palm OS and not Windows Mobile.

Launched last fall, Centro has until now only been available in one country, the U.S., and from a single carrier, Sprint. A surprise success, Centro is Palm’s most consumer-friendly and lowest-priced smartphone ever.

The Centro offered by Sprint’s is a CDMA smartphone with support for EV-DO 3G, as those are the wireless standards used by the carrier’s cellular network. Since most of Europe runs under rival GSM technology, as does the majority of mobile networks worldwide, the version shipping there will support that standard instead of CDMA.

Unfortunately, Palm’s decided not to support GSM-style UTMS/HSPDA 3G data networking with the European Centro. So it tops out at the far slower 2.5G EDGE standard.

With Centro Palm is targeting the mainstream and youth markets for the first time with one of its smartphones; or, to put it another way, 95 percent - the vast majority - of the mobile phone market.

Although the Palm OS-run Centro sports the Treo's hallmark touch screen (at 2.2-inches and 320 x 320 pixels) and QWERTY thumb-keyboard, it is the first Palm smartphone since the Tungsten W not fall under that vaunted and aging line of smartphones.

Centro measures only 4.2 x 2.1 x 0.7 inches (107 x 54 x 18 millimeters) and weighs in at a light 4.2 ounces (119 grams).

There’s 64M of internal storage and a microSD slot for up to 4GB of additional storage per memory card. It also sports Bluetooth, a 1150mAh removable battery, and a 1.3 megapixel camera with 2x digital zoom digital camera.