Over the past couple of years Palm founder Jeff Hawkins has talked about the company being in the process of developing a new category of device; neither PDA or smartphone but something different. How different? He hasn't made clear.

Speaking with PalmAddicts, Hawkins, now a consultant for new products to the PDA pioneer, strongly indicated we'll soon learn exactly what he's been talking about all this time. He said the product would ship this year and suggested Palm followers should pay attention to his speech at Walt Mossberg’s D Conference this May.

Other than the above Hawkins offered nothing else about the new product. Speaking with Business 2.0 awhile back he implied the new device could be revolutionary, as with a couple of Palm's past devices: "One of the missions we have at Palm is to design breakout products. It's hard, really hard, to do. Palm's done it twice, you could argue, with the original Palm Pilot, and the Treo smartphone. We've got another one in development."

Hawkins said this about his current project to the Portland Business Journal back in July 2005:

What are the implications of a world where everyone has a super high-speed Internet connection in their pocket and many gigabytes of storage, super-fast processors, audio, visual and multimedia? What are the consequences of that? How will that change computing when you have all that stuff available to you all the time? I try to think into the future. That's how we come up with new products. So I'm not going to tell you what it is, but it's following the consequences of mobile computing.

A supposed leaked Sprint roadmap of the carrier's product line for 2007 revealed a new Palm device called Sherlock. Other than the code-name and a possible June launch date, nothing else is known about the device.

Is it a CDMA version of the Treo 680 or Treo 750, another new smartphone or handheld, or, perhaps, the mysterious third category of device Hawkins has been referring to? We just might finally find out this May.