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ASUS has released some details about its upcoming Pocket PC, the MyPal A730. The company expects to fully announce the MyPal A730 later this week at CeBIT Hannover 2004, the biggest trade show in the world.

Significantly, the MyPal A730 will be the second Pocket PC to include a VGA display. The first is the Toshiba e805. A VGA display delivers a resolution of 640x480 pixels compared with the current Pocket PC standard of 240x320. The next major update of Windows Mobile, due later this year, will support this resolution as well as portrait and landscape viewing.

A 640x480 resolution allows users, for example, to view whole Web pages on a PDA without scrolling. The Toshiba e805 uses proprietary technology to run at 640x480, but can only do so with a few applications. Reports place the release of the MyPal A730 in the May/June time-frame, so we expect it to run the new version of Windows Mobile with VGA support.

Even better than 640x480 would be a 800x600 resolution PDA screen. But don't expect to see these anytime soon. Nevertheless, Fujitsu developed and showed off a prototype handheld with a 800x600 (SVGA) 4-inch LCD last year.

Another major feature of the MyPal A730 will be a Intel 520MHz XScale CPU, which is a 120MHz more powerful than the fastest XScale's found in current handhelds. This must mean that the processor found in the MyPal A730 will be part of a new series of XScale processors.

Other known features of the Pocket PC include a 1.3 million-pixel camera for up to 1280x960 resolution size pictures, as well as both integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Reports place the price of the MyPal A730 Pocket PC at more than $500, which is in line with the cost of current high-end Pocket PC models.

We'll report additional information about the Pocket PC when it is officially announced later this week.