The long-awaited Palm Pre smartphone will go on sale in the US on June 6 and will be available in Sprint Stores, Best Buy, RadioShack and a few Wal-Mart stores for $199.99, after a $100 rebate, with a two-year contract – matching the price of Apple’s 3G iPhone.

The new handset, unveiled by Palm at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, features a touchscreen as well as a slide-out keyboard and a new web-based operating system developed by Palm to replace the ageing system used on most of its current family of Treo smartphone devices.