Palm Chief Executing Officer (CEO) Ed Colligan revealed in a short interview that the company’s Pre would be arriving in European countries during the first half of this year, which is about the time it would be hitting the United States, as well.

The Palm Pre version was announced at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) that is being held in Las Vegas until January 11 and it has been stated that Sprint would get exclusive access to it in the United States.

Palm’s new Pre currently supports EV-DO Rev A for mobile broadband access, but the company said it was also working on developing a more Euro-friendly version of the gadget.

Moreover, the Pre comes fitted with Palm’s new operating system WebOS and also combines a touch interface with a QWERTY keyboard that slides out from the bottom of the smartphone.

For the time being, no information has been given out concerning the handset’s price.

Last year during the third quarter, approximately 780,000 PalmOS based phones were sold, which translates as an increase by over 50 percent from the same time frame the year before.

Nevertheless, rivals Research In Motion (RIM) and Apple Incorporated sold 5.8 million and 4.72 million smartphones, respectively.

Although the WebOS has come into pretty high critical acclaim, skeptics are saying that Palm’s new Pre will not be able to pull the company out of their financial issues.

First of all, given that the handset will only be made available in mid-2009, competitors have plenty of time to come up with ways and features to outrun the Pre

Furthermore, Palm has put its new device in Sprint’s hands, which lags behind both Verizon Wireless and AT&T, which means that consumers would not be much enticed into purchasing Palm’s smartphone.

Then there is also the issue of the rivals, RIM and Apple, who happen to have a very loyal user-base that is also expanding, so the likelihood of customers being drawn to making a change and dropping the two companies is rather low. Currently, people have signed contracts with either T-Mobile for Google’s G1 phone, the first to use the open-source Android operating system, or with Verizon Wireless for RIM’s BlackBerry Storm.

If a few years ago, Palm stood out as the unquestioned leader in the U.S. smartphone and PDA market, now the tide has turned and the company has come to struggle to survive and cope with financial losses.

Back in December, the smartphone maker posted a net loss of $506.2 million for its second quarter of the fiscal year 2009, while its smartphone revenue dropped $171 million, down 39% from a year before.

Still, at that time, the company said that it was optimistic about the success of the new products they would be introducing in 2009, adding that by the fiscal year 2010, that success would translate into revenue and increasing unit sales.