Click to View

Vendors have introduced a pack of smaller than usual smartphones built on Microsoft's Pocket PC platform over the last few months. Leading the pack is Samsung's upcoming SCH-i730.

The i730 turned more than a few heads at its introduction last Novebmer in New York City. Although some information about the Pocket PC Phone leaked over the last few months, a potential release date has been elusive.

That is no longer the case.

BargainPDA asserts it recently received "strong hints" that Samsung will announce the release of the i730 at CTIA Wireless 2005 next month. The tradeshow and conference runs from March 14th to 16th in New Orleans.

The i730 should bundle 64MB of RAM and 128MB of ROM—a very amount of memory for a smartphone. It'll also integrate Windows Media Player 10, dual stereo speakers, and 3D sound.

Other features include Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless networking, which are increasingly common to high-end smartphones (e.g. Hewlett-Packard's iPAQ h6315, Motorola's MPx, Nokia's 9500 & 9300 Communicators, among others). It also has an SDIO-enabled Secure Digital slot for peripheral and memory expansion, and a processor that runs at about 500MHz.

Although the i730 uses the standard tablet Pocket PC design, it integrates a retractable QWERTY thumb-keyboard that slides down from underneath its 2.8-inch (240 x 320 pixel resolution and 65,536 color) display. You view the screen in either portrait or landscape modes because the handset runs on the Windows Mobile 2003 for Pocket PC Second Edition platform.


You would see a lot less hand with
the average Pocket PC Phone

With EV-DO, CDMA carriers like Verizon Wireless and Sprint could conceivably offer the i730 for their high-speed 3G networks, which theoretically transfer data at speeds up to 2.4 MBps. No carriers have been announced yet, however.

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.