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MTV attempted to generate enthusiasm for its fledgling network with the slogan "I want my MTV" back in the '80s. Although it took a few years for the channel to take hold, kids eventually really did want their music television.

No such marketing ploy was needed to generate enthusiasm for VGA-enabled Pocket PCs in the summer of '04. Reports and rumors of upcoming handhelds with 640 x 480 pixel resolution screens created plenty of demand on their own.

Why VGA?

A VGA screen would let you view whole Web pages on a handheld. Or, perhaps, work on a spreadsheet on a PDA without continually scrolling the document up and down and side to side.

Yet as we've discovered in recent weeks, some of these eagerly awaited handhelds have been delayed or aren't even slated for release in the United States .

The latest blow comes in the form of Toshiba's e830 (see image), which the company officially introduced this week. The high-end Pocket PC with a VGA screen, 520MHz CPU, 128MB of RAM, 64MB of ROM, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and CompactFlash and SDIO Secure Digital slots reportedly won't make its way to U.S. shores—even though it went through the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) approval process. The electronics company seems to have chosen to release the e830 only in Europe and Japan anyway.

Another new VGA-enabled Pocket PC, the Pocket LOOX 720 from Fujitsu-Siemens is already shipping … in Europe. But there's no word as to when or if it will find its way to the U.S. market.

It is likelier North America consumers will see new VGA models from Hewlett-Packard with the iPAQ hx4705, Asus with the MyPal A730, and purportedly Dell with the Axim X50 this fall despite apparent delays for all three.

The Dell model will probably ship until after November 8th, as the computer maker recently filed an updated confidentiality request with the FCC that expires on that date. That way the agency may not sill the beans on the X50 as it does with so many other handhelds.

HP's hx4705 should have shipped at the end of August but was delayed until September 9th because of a, reported, insufficient quantity of LCD screens. While that date has come and gone, if you check retails sites, they either list the device as out of stock or taking several weeks to deliver.

Asus first announced the MyPal A730 back in March. But a couple of expected release dates passed quietly since that time. So it looks like the Pocket PC probably won't ship until October.

For more on all of these VGA Pocket PCs, see the articles listed bellow.