Remember when Palm was relevant? They had some of the first PDAs on the market; more recently (although still several years ago) they came up with the Treo PDA, one of the best on the market. At one time, it was the hot company in mobile devices.

Those days are long gone as Palm has slid into irrelevance of late, and the iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and other smartphones have taken over.

Palm hopes to change all that with the ‘Pre’, which is set to be unveiled to the world on June 6. The Pre will carry a price tag of $199.99 with a two-year agreement with Sprint, its sole wireless carrier in the U.S. (side note: that’s after a $100 mail-in rebate. I don’t know about you, but I hate mail-in rebates. So you’ll be shelling out about $300 initially for the device.)

The Pre will be sold at a number of stores, including Sprint, Best Buy, Radio Shack, select Wal-Mart stores and online at Sprint.com. The Pre will run on the new Palm webOS mobile platform, about which little is currently known.

Some specs: it has a 3.1-inch multitouch screen with 320×480 resolution, and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard; the phone weighs in at a svelte 4.8 ounces.  The Pre will also have some version of an app store, similar to those offered by Apple, Android and the most recent entry, BlackBerry. It has a touch screen that is getting rave reviews as well — a number of reviewers have compared it favorably to my beloved iPhone, and some like it more (blasphemy!)

I don’t have a Pre, but early reviews are glowing. It looks like Palm may be getting back into the gadget game in a big way, and provide a device that competes on the porch with the other Big Dogs. Welcome back, Palm!