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Palm platform aficionados are hungry for a new Treo built on their favorite mobile operating system. For them, the Windows Mobile-based Palm Treo 700w simply didn't fit the bill. Fortunately, Palm, Inc. appears to have a Palm OS version of that smartphone, the Treo 700p, in the works.

Although some details are already known about the 700p, a possible release date hasn't been, until now. PalmInfocenter reported a rumor from a 'reliable' source today that the 700p is due in the May/June timeframe. The person learned the information from a tech at a Sprint store, who showed him an internal Web page with the estimated due date.

Although late spring/early summer is a little later than what had been earlier conjectured - April - the operator, Sprint, matches previously leaked images of the 700p.

Here's what else we think we know so far:

The 700p should run on the ever increasingly long-in-the-tooth Palm OS Garnet (version 5.4.9), which Palm finesses with its own interface and under-the-hood tweaks—While platform developer PalmSource continues to support the Palm OS, it will no longer release upgrades, concentrating on the ACCESS Linux Platform (ALP) moving forward.

With 700p, there should be high-speed EV-DO (400 to 700 kbps) networking, a must for Palm fans itching for Treo functionality but dreading the move to Windows Mobile. Additional supposed features include a 312 MHz Intel XScale processor, a 320 x 320 pixel high resolution display, Bluetooth, about 63 MB of free memory, and a 1.3 megapixel camera.

Palm should deliver FAT32 driver support with this device, a "fast mode" in the blazer Web browser, and a NVFS dbCache size of 18,431 kb; a first for the company. NVFS is what allows data to survive in the event of a complete power drain.