Well, after many leaked shots and leaked data sheets and forum members getting the device in their hands early, Palm this morning announced the newest WM Treo, the Palm Treo 800w on Sprint. The 800w became available on Sprint's website Sunday morning.

The Treo 800w is a nice slate blue color and resembles the design of the Centro. The 800w has the soft touch paint like the Treo 750 which gives it a nice grip.

The 800w is the first Palm WM Treo to have a 320 x 320 display. The other WM Treos had 240 x 240 screens. Some apps might not work very well yet with this new screen resolution. For example, forum member Darth Pooh said that after installing Skype on his 800w, the resolution doesn't fit the 320 320 screen, and he got a message saying, "We're sorry...cannot start Skype" and the Skype crashed.

But I read in another post that the 320 x 320 resolution helped with some apps that didn't look good on the 700wx. Forum member MBC said:

The high-res screen actually helped with some of my apps on the 800w that looked rather stupid on my 700wx. An example of that would be WeatherPanel. I love how it looks on the Touch, but I hated it on my 700wx. It seems that the 800w adjusts the resolution of the app to make it "fit" onto the screen. So now it looks oddly small, but it is very usable and functional. I'm also looking for resolution settings for this, but who knows if I will find them.

Of course the biggest newness of the Treo 800w is that it's the first Palm smartphone ever to have built-in Wi-Fi! About time, huh? I hope that the rest of the Palm smartphones also start shipping with built-in Wi-Fi. The word in the forums regarding web browsing is that it's much quicker with REV A and the Wi-Fi is even faster. Sweet!

Another plus for the 800w is that it has GPS. Forum members who have already purchased an 800w say that the GPS works great. The 800w has a "Point of Interest" lookup field on the Today screen which comes in handy. You can find a post office, an ATM machine, or a pizza place, etc,.

Remember that mockup pic of the 800w that jrinehart posted in the forums? Well, it actually turned out to be pretty darn accurate, after manipulating the pic and making it thinner. Check it out next to the "real thing" here. Just change the color to the slate blue and couple other minor details here and there and you would pretty much have the 800w.

Key Features:

• Sprint TV® enabled
• Speakerphone
• Built-in camera
• Web, email capable
• Bluetooth
• External display
• GPS enabled
• Memory card slot
• Broadband speeds where available

And here are the specs:

• Radio: CDMA 800 (Digital Cellular), 1900 (PCS), and 1.5GHz (GPS) EVDO (Ref 0, Rev A) and 1XRTT
• Operating System: Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional
• Memory: 256MB user memory/128MB program memory
• Display: TFT with 65K color and 320 x 320 resolution
• Camera: 2.0 megapixel camera/camcorder
• Expansion: MicroSD/SDHC card slot
• Dimension: 4.4" x 2.3" x 0.7"
• Weight: 5.0 oz
• Battery Information: 1150 mAh standard, rechargabel lithium-ion
• Connectivity: Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g, 802.1x with EAP-PEAP, EAP-TLS)
Bluetooth 2.0 and Infrared
• Keyboard: Built-in QWERTY keyboard

The Treo 800w is a feature packed smartphone for sure. It has the built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and you can talk on a bluetooth headset and browse the web via Wi-Fi simultaneously.

The Treo 800w is available at Sprint.com and Palm.com.

You can get the Treo 800w for $249.99 after a $100 mail-in-rebate and an instant savings of $250, but this price requires a 2-year contract. You can get the 800w for $599.99 with no strings attached though.

---