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Initially available exclusively through Best Buy, you can now buy Motorola's new MPx220 smartphone directly from Cingular Wireless—the only mobile operator in the United States to carry the compact Windows Mobile handset.

This news follows a difficult month for the highly anticipated smartphone, where Best Buy had to pull the MPx220 from store shelves to implement a system upgrade to correct an audio problem (see Motorola Recalls MPx220 Smartphone).

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—a secondary screen is 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 pictures with the smartphone's 1.23 megapixel camera, which also features a 3x digital zoom and a flash.

The MPx220’s 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 platform. 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.

You can use Cingluar’s ALLOVER GSM/GPRS network to access the full range of the carrier’s Media Net data services, including text and video messaging, multimedia applications, downloadable ringtones, graphics and photos, a variety of mobile games, and Cingular's Xpress Mail suite for access to corporate and personal e-mail.

The MPx220 sells for $299.99 with a two-year contract and $349.99 with a one-year contract. Monthly voice plans start at $39.99. As an add-on, the company's PDA Connect rate plans enable wireless Internet access for $29.99 with 5 MB data for e-mail and web browsing or $39.99 which includes unlimited data