European operators are not worried about Palm’s decision to stop shipping its Treo650 into Europe, Palm vp EMEA Roy Bedlow has said.
lly aware of Palm’s plans to delay shipping any more of the smartphones until the new model was produced in accordance with the Europe’s Reduction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) legislation directive.
“They have plenty in the warehouses and will be shipping from there,” he said.
Meanwhile, Vodafone has agreed to range Palm’s forthcoming new 3G smartphone for the European market.
The device will support Windows Mobile’s 5.0, meaning there is support for push email through the system’s Messaging and Security Feature Pack.
Bedlow said the phone would be delivered on the PocketPC edition rather than the smartphone edition,.
The advantage of the full PocketPC implementation is that the device will support a fuller range of applications (Excel, Word, Powerpoint), as well as offering touch screen input and other features such as the capacity to save image and sound files, Bedlow said.
Bedlow said the announcement was “very significant” for Palm, and brought “three fantastic partners [Palm, Vodafone, Microsoft] together”.
“It also shows Vodafone’s commitment to get behind Microsoft’s OS, and maybe that’s something they haven’t done in the past. Other operators have come to Microsoft platforms a little earlier than them.”
Vodafone now works with a range of partners to deliver mobile email to enterprise and consumer customers. Palm’s contract for the new smartphone is its first European operator contract beyond Orange.
Smartphones accounted for 69% of Palm’s revenue in the financial year just finished, compared with 46% the year before. In the fourth quarter, smartphones accounted for 75% of revenues, so the importance of this segment is clear to the company.
T-Mobile has also just announced the availability of Microsoft’s Push Email to enterprise users of its WM 5.0 devices, including the MDA range. Initially, the Microsoft Push Email service from T-Mobile will be available to customers using Microsoft Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2.