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We have a number of Microsoft Pocket PC PDAs that look and act like PDAs but double as cell phones. We have PDA-shaped Blackberry phones. And we have smartphones that are basically cell phones with Palm or Symbian personal information management (PIM) functions thrown in.

Now Sierra Wireless adds another variation to the mix. Its $499 Voq Professional Phone, an international tri-band GSM/GPRS device, is a Windows Mobile smartphone with a BlackBerry-like keyboard. And it comes with VoqMail software that can provide an always-connected e-mail experience similar to Blackberry.

The Voq phone sells in mass-market retail outlets and specialty mobile phone retailers and business-to-business resellers, usually for $500 or $600 depending on the e-mail option selected (see below). It should work on any GSM network.

Whether this product simplifies decision making about which kind of communication device to carry or makes it more difficult is not quite clear.

Hardware
The Voq phone looks like a cell phone, with a cell phone-style number pad, and it's not much bigger than the smallest mobiles (5.24 x 2.1 x .9 inches, 4.94 oz.) The first surprising difference is that the lower half of the front surface flips back on a hinge, revealing an ingenious "thumb pad," a tiny QWERTY keyboard with half the keys to the left of the hinge (on the back of the number pad), half to the right.


Keyboard Exposed

This product also has a little more horsepower than the average smartphone—it uses the 200MHz Intel XScale PXA262 processor. It doesn't offer as much built-in memory as full-size PDAs—20MB of flash memory and 16MB of RAM for user data—but does have an Secure Digital (SD) flash memory card slot. The LCD is a bit better and bigger than most smart phones—2.17 inches diagonally, 176 x 220 pixels, 64,000 colors.

As a phone, the Voq product can function much like any other cell phone. With the QWERTY thumb pad folded away, you use the conventional phone number pad to dial a number, and then hit the green Send key to place the call.

There is one concession to its being a smartphone. If you're working in a non-phone-related PDA application, you have to press the Home key before it will accept number pad input.

Network
We tested the phone on the Rogers AT&T network in Canada, in an area where coverage is only okay. Signal strength appeared to be good with the Voq phone, however, and connection and voice quality were above average in our test calls.

We also tested Internet browsing on the Rogers GPRS network. It appeared to be a little slower than I have experienced at other times, but it's unlikely this had anything to do with the Voq unit.

The real differences with this product only become clear when you start playing with the innovative interface and the PDA functions.