Microsoft's road into the smartphone market has been more rocky than Palm's or Symbian's. The company currently has two versions of its mobile operating system for these types of devices, Pocket PC Phone Edition and Windows Powered Smartphone. Pocket PC Phone Edition devices lean more towards the PDA side of the PDA/Phone hybrid, while Windows Powered Smartphone comes at the smartphone from the other side, phone first and PDA second.

Players in the Pocket PC phone market include Toshiba and its 2032SP and Audiovox' with its Thera PDA2032 (identical units), supported by Sprint and Verizon, as well as the latest Pocket PC/phone hybrid, T-Mobile's Pocket PC Phone.

Toshiba 2032SP

The $799 dual-band Toshiba/Audiovox supports the Sprint PCS and CDMA protocols, but doesn't run the Pocket PC Phone Edition OS. Rather it uses a phone application from Sierra Wireless. The device functions better as a PDA than a cellphone. Being a Pocket PC device, it has more powerful features than its Palm brethren, including a 206MHz Strong Arm processor, 32MB of RAM, 65,536 color display and an SD card slot. The rather large devices measures 5.0 x 3.0 x 0.8 inches and weighs 7 ounces. It specs out at a limited 90 minutes of talk time and a mere 8 hours standby time.

Like the Toshiba/Audiovox smartphones, the GSM T-Mobile Pocket PC Phone Edition smartphone is more of a PDA than a phone. However, the $550 T-Mobile is a sleeker device, as it is built by the same company,High Tech Computer (HTC) of Taiwan, that makes Hewlett-Packard's renowned iPAQ. Like the other Pocket PC phones, it is rather large, at 5.0 x 2.8 x0.7-inches and 6.8 ounces and doesn't support a real keypad, but a virtual one on the screen's display. It has a 320 x 240 pixel screen at 4,096 colors, a 206MHz StrongARM processor, 32MB of RAM, and an SD card slot. This GSM Pocket PC phone is also sold in the U.S. by AT&T Wireless as the Siemens SX56. T-Mobile but adds GPS capabilities.

HTC recently received approval from the FCC to sell a new Pocket PC Phone code-named Falcon. The dual-band Falcon, which runs on CDMA networks, is similar the AT&T Wireless and T-Mobile devices, but adds GPS capabilities.

T-Mobile Pocket PC Phone Edition