Click to View

For too long now - well over a year - the PPC-6700 has set the standard for Pocket PC Phones for CDMA carriers like Sprint, Verizon Wireless and Alltel. This week, Sprint became the first company in the U.S. to deliver the replacement for that smartphone, the HTC Mogul (also known as the PPC-6800 and Titan). It's been available in Canada for a few weeks now from Telus as the HTC P4000.

The Mogul, like its predecessor, is a slider-smartphone that when opened reveals a landscape-oriented QWERTY thumb-keyboard. And, just like Palm has done with its most recent Treo models, the Mogul loses the PPC-6700's external antenna, making it considerably sleeker.

It appears to have the same five-way navigation button as the earlier model. And there's also a BlackBerry-like thumbwheel to aid one-handed operation.

The new smartphone's 3G radio, based on the EV-DO standard used by CDMA carriers, will be upgradeable to the Revision A 3.5G version of that technology when it becomes available to as a free software upgrade at a later date; so Mogul will eventually deliver much faster access to cellular-wireless data services like e-mail, video and the Web. There's also 802.11b/g Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0 than the PPC-6700.

And, unlike the PPC-6700, the Mogul ships with Microsoft's latest mobile-device operating system, Windows Mobile 6 Professional (formally known as Pocket PC Phone), with all the advantages that platform offers over Windows Mobile 5 (see links below for details).

The Mogul measures 4.3 x 2.3 x 0.73 inches and weighs 5.8 ounces.

Its battery is supposed to deliver 20 percent more power than the PPC-6700's.

There's a 2.8-inch, 320 x 240 pixel (QVGA) resolution touch-screen, a 2.0 megapixel camera, 256MB of ROM (twice that of the PPC-6700), 64MB of RAM, and a microSD card slot. Sprint plans to bundle a 512MB card with the Mogul.

While the Mogul is available online and through business channels, it won't hit retail until the middle of next month. Sprint sells it for $550 without a contract or $400 with a two-year deal. when

Click here to see our review of the Telus edition of the Mogul, the P4000, which runs on Windows Mobile 5 and not Windows Mobile 6 for some reason.