Vincent may have washed his hands of Palm, but it looks like the company still has a few cards to play; thing is, we’ll apparently have to wait until April to see if they’re aces.  According to an anonymous tipster at WM Experts the ailing company is set to launch a Sprint CDMA Treo called the 800w, complete with Windows Mobile 6, a touchscreen, EvDO Rev. A and WiFi.

Unlike some of the chubby Treos of the past, the 800w is apparently “as thin as a Centro” (which, frankly, still might not be good enough), has assisted-GPS and bears a standard miniUSB port on the bottom rather than Palm’s proprietary connector.

“The Treo 800w (from Sprint) will have a mini-USB plug on the bottom of the device. It’s about as thin as a Centro, and actually feels quite nice in the hand. It will ship with WinMo 6, and will be compatible with WinMo 6.1 once an update is released. Not a whole lot of feature upgrades, but does make it compatible with Microsoft System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008. Along with the classic on/off switch for the ringer, there is a convenient WiFi on/off button. I tried the camera out, and at 2.0mp, it took decent pictures, though I didn’t have a chance to upload them to my PC to look over. It also comes standard with an EvDO Rev. A radio, bluetooth 2.0 +EDR, and 802.11g WiFi. [...] This device is slated to be released in April of this year.” Tip post 1

“The Treo 800W has MicroSD and 256MB memory. I believe there is another 128MB for something else, but I can’t remember what the document said. [...]Oh, and there’s no more headphone jack on the device, you’ll have to utilize the mini-usb plug with an adapter, or use bluetooth wireless.” Tip post 2

Might it be enough to turn around Palm’s fortunes?  Although I’d like to think so, at the same time I reckon the company needs a fundamental rather than an incremental upgrade as, despite the reasonable specs, the 800w sounds to be.  With the iPhone mopping up the fashion-conscious pseudo-smartphone buyers, HTC cornering the market in smartphones of every niche, and stalwarts HP returning to the game with their own range, Palm really need to step up their game and “wow” us.