Treo smartphone introduced by Palm Inc which is based on Microsoft Corp software to battle with its rival BlackBerry. Vodafone Group Plc and O2 will be selling Treo Pro in Europe in September and Telstra in Australia said the company. Palm does not have an agreement in USA with a carrier to sell the phone. But the company said that the entreprise demand is growing for unlocked phones that can work on any network. However analyst says that Treo Pro’s price tag of $549 is high without the subsidies typically offered by carriers to lock in subscribers. Analyst further said that given the pricing and lack of carrier sponsorship in the U.S., we believe initial sales of the Treo Pro will be limited. Only 21 percent of Palm revenue came from international sales in its fiscal year 2008, analyst added.

Treo Pro is with Wi-FI that boosts Web Speeds in weak cell phone reception areas and also have GPS (Global Positioning System) that supports features such as direction.

“We’ve chosen to partner with Microsoft to compete effectively with RIM,” said Brodie Keast, Palm senior vice president for marketing. There was plenty of room for both companies to grow in the smartphone market, he added. “Even with the growth in this market, 90 percent of the market doesn’t have a smartphone. It doesn’t make sense to fight over the 10 percent,” said Keast. “We want to reach out to people who don’t have a smartphone, not people who already love RIM,” he further added.
Keast said it was likely that more Palm devices would include Wi-Fi in the future as there is growing demand for alternative connectivity in areas where phone reception is weak, or when users want faster speeds to download big files.
“Going forward for premium, fully featured devices, Wi-Fi is a requirement,” he said.

Keast said that Palm was on track to come out with a new phone software platform aimed at consumers in the first half of next year, and that this would put it in more direct competition with the iPhone from Apple Inc. He does not see the iPhone, which now supports corporate e-mail, as a direct competitor to the Treo Pro, Keast added.

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