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Leading the pack of new, smaller, smartphones built on Microsoft's Pocket PC platform is Samsung’s upcoming SCH-i730. That Pocket PC Phone has turned more than a few heads since the electronics company introduced it back in November at its annual showcase in New York City.

Although some information about the i730 was already available—much of it thanks to Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which approved the smartphone for release in the United States a couple of weeks back—some details remained a mystery.

Now we know a little more.

According to CNET, which got its hands on a prototype of the i730 recently, the handset will have, in addition to its 64MB of RAM, 128MB of ROM—a good amount of memory for a smartphone. It will also integrate Windows Media Player 10, dual stereo speakers, and 3D sound.

We already knew the i730 would include both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless networking, features that are increasingly common to high-end smartphones (e.g. Hewlett-Packard's iPAQ h6315, Motorola's MPx, Nokia's 9500 & 9300 Communicators, among others).

Although the i730 uses the standard tablet Pocket PC design, it integrates a QWERTY thumb-keyboard that slides down from underneath its 2.8-inch (240 x 320 pixel resolution and 65,536 color) display, which you can view in either portrait or landscape modes because the handset runs on the Windows Mobile 2003 for Pocket PC Second Edition platform. It also has an SDIO-enabled Secure Digital slot for peripheral and memory expansion, and a processor that runs at about 500MHz.


Keyboard Retracted

Perhaps, most importantly, the smartphone supports EV-DO. With EV-DO, CDMA carriers like Verizon and Sprint could offer the i730 for their 3G networks—theoretically transfering data at speeds up to 2.4 MBps.

Since Samsung often creates versions of its cell phones and smartphones for the two most important cellular-wireless standards, we won't be surprised if the company develops a GSM/GPRS edition of the i730 sometime down the road.

The i730 should ship in the next few months for an as-of-yet undisclosed price