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Palm's upgrade to the Treo 700w may soon find its way to Verizon Wireless, according to information on the carrier's Web site. Chief CDMA competitor Sprint has been offering the Treo 700w for a few months now, while Verizon became the first operator - period - to deliver a Windows Mobile Treo, the Treo 700w, a year ago.

The Verizon Web site lists the Treo 700wx with Treo 700p when advertising $100 Mail in rebate for those smartphones and a $150 rebate for the older Treo 700w. Verizon's rebate is listed as being valid for purchases between 1/16/07 and 02/19/07. This is a strong indication that the Treo 700wx could be available by the middle of February.

Hardware-wise the 700wx and 700w are nearly identical expect for one key difference: The former has twice as much RAM, 64 MB, as the latter. What this does is give the 700wx 44 MB of user-available memory compared to the 700w's mere 25 MB, leaving more room for applications to run. So when you've got several apps up at once, for example, the performance of the 700wx will be far less likely to slow down.

The Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC Phone, which measures 4.4 x 2.3 x .9 inches (111 x 58 x 22.5 millimeters) and weighs 6.4 ounces (180 grams), runs on a 312 MHz Intel XScale processor, and it has an SDIO-enabled Secure Digital slot for memory and peripheral expansion. There's a square 240 x 240 pixel resolution touch screen with 65,536 colors, and a 1.3 megapixel camera with 2x digital zoom.

Like other Treos, its QWERTY thumb-keyboard is backlit and it has a 5-way navigator and speakerphone.

The 700wx also delivers Bluetooth dial-up networking (along with USB) to allow users to leverage the Treo as a wireless modem for a laptop through a 400-700 kbps EV-DO network out-of-the box. The same connection that deliver speedy access to e-mail, the Web, video, audio, handset TV and other content services.

It also integrates Microsoft-based push e-mail through the software giant’s Windows Mobile Messaging and Security Feature Pack (MSFP), which includes Direct Push Technology for messages, calendar, contacts, and tasks; native S/MIME support, certificate-based authentication to all Exchange data; and remote and local device wipe.

America's third largest CDMA carrier, regional operator Alltel Wireless, started offering the Treo 700wx last week a month ago.

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