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Verizon's exclusive hold over the Treo 700w could end next week, when Sprint may announce it'll start carrying a variation of Palm's first Windows Mobile smartphone. Although the exact day isn't clear—availablility for business customers between August 25th and 31st and the general public on September 3rd—what is certain is the name of the smartphone, as offered by Sprint, will be Treo 700wx.

The first hint that Sprint would carry the Windows Mobile Treo resulted from the operator adding it to its connection manager software.

Today there's additional evidence, in this Sprint Treo 700wx data sheet and these two images of what are supposed to be the Treo 700wx's box posted on the TreoCentral message board.

It appears the extra 'x' is there to indicate the addition of some extra features to the CDMA-EV-DO Treo; most notably the doubling of the unit's memory from 32 MB to 64 MB. Although both carriers launched Palm's second Treo of the year, the Palm OS Teo 700p nearly simultaneously, that obviously wasn't the case for the Treo 700w, which Verizon started offering in January.

Other than the increase in memory, the Sprint version should closely resemble the Verizon Treo 700w. This means it'll have a 240 x 240-pixel resolution touch display above its QWERTY thumb-keyboard. And the Pocket PC will run on Windows Mobile 5.0 and a 312 MHz CPU. There's an SDIO slot for memory and peripheral expansion as well.

For more on the Treo 700w, see our review.