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Motorola, in partnership with carrier Cingular Wireless and electronics retailer Best Buy, launched the MPx220 smartphone today. The new mobile handset is the cell phone vendor's eagerly awaited follow up to the MPx200, one of the first Windows Mobile smartphones available in the United States.

Unveiled back in June, the Quad band (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) GSM/GPRS MPx220 is—at 3.5 x 1.9 x 1.1 inches—a little larger than the extremely compact MPx200 (see Review: Motorola's Compact MPx200 Smartphone). It weighs the same 4 ounces, however.

Like its predecessor, the MPx220 is a clamshell handset. It has two displays—one on the top half of the clamshell that offers date time and other phone info (pictures as photo Ids) at 12-bit color depth. You can take these pictures with the smartphone's 1.23 megapixel camera, which also features a 3x digital zoom and a flash.

Its main display supports 65,537 colors with a resolution of 176 x 220 pixels. Like the earlier model, the MPx220 has a D-Pad for navigation, along with a keypad, on the bottom half of the clamshell.

The MPx220 runs the more recent Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition smartphone platform, a step up from MPx200's Microsoft's 2002 Smartphone OS. In terms of memory, the MPx220 doubles the amount of RAM of the MPx200 from 32MB to 64MB.

There is a miniSD card slot for memory expansion. Unlike the Secure Digital format, miniSD, which is about half the size, only supports memory and not peripheral expansion. As a Bluetooth device, you can use headsets and other wireless peripherals, such as printers and keyboards, with the MPx220.

Best Buy will sell the smartphone nationwide beginning on October 17th, while Cingular plans to offer the MPx220 in its stores next month. The handset will cost $500 a la carte and $350 with a one-year service agreement: Sign-up for two years and you get an additional $100 rebate.