Palm & Sprint Sitting in a Tree Making 4G WiMAX Smartphone? [Palm Is Rumored to Make a WiMAX Handset for Sprint; We Kinda Want to Believe It]

So Palm released webOS 1.4 this year, which is all fine and dandy, but what about a new smartphone? Last year around this particular time everyone was dazzled by the Palm Pre, a phone not yet launched but very much talked about. And then the Palm Pre came and failed to dully fight Apple’s iPhone.

Then came the Pixi and the Plus versions of these phones for Verizon, but we’re still wanting more from Palm. They have a solid mobile platform and we’re looking forward to see them announce a brand new smartphone already. Everyone else in the business is doing it so what is Palm’s strategy here?

Rumors say that the company is working closely with Sprint to make a WiMAX-enabled device. Those rumors have been around for a while and we did mention them a couple of times already. We even had a name for said phone, the C40, which appeared in January on a leaked Sprint 2010 spreadsheet containing the rumored roadmap for this year.

Now there’s no indication that Palm is actually going through with such WiMAX plans but rumors keep popping around saying that basically Palm will either be dipping into this whole new WiMAX market or will continue its mobile venture with other partners than Sprint.

So what would you like Palm to do folks? Release regular, 3G phones with other carriers and wait for LTE to arrive or take a chance with Sprint’s fresh WiMAX business? Should the latter version occur we might just see Palm get reborn and take Sprint along with it. Both companies need something hot happening in their professional lives and a WiMAX-enabled, webOS-running, hot Palm 4G phone might just do the trick.

Of course, should people choose to wait for LTE instead of trying out WiMAX, then this speculative project will be doomed and we will witness another Palm handset that didn’t quite make it out there.