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.

Software
Although the operating system is not strictly speaking Pocket PC—it runs Microsoft's Windows Mobile 2003 for Smartphone—the Vo1 is built on the same foundation. It differs from Pocket PC mainly in supporting smaller mobile handset screens, being optimized for joystick and numeric input rather than handwriting recognition and tapping, and featuring a somewhat simpler, less cluttered onscreen user interface.

This device doesn't, for fairly obvious reasons, come with Pocket versions of Word and Excel as Pocket PC Phones do, but it does come with the other familiar Windows-like Pocket PC apps, including Internet Explorer, Inbox (POP3 e-mail), Windows Media Player, MSN Messenger and almost identical Contacts, Calendar and ToDo applets that can by synchronized with Outlook using the also included Microsoft ActiveSync.

The applications Sierra Wireless adds to the mix are part of what makes the Voq worth considering. The VoqMail Professional software lets you automatically pull messages from a corporate IMAP-compatible (Internet Message Access Protocol) e-mail account.

It works efficiently enough, according to SierraWireless, that it can in effect replicate the Blackberry always-there e-mail experience. Unlike Blackberry, however, it doesn't require any server-side hardware or software. We were unable to test this feature.

You can set up the smartphone's Inbox program to pull e-mail off a POP server but only at timed intervals, the shortest being 15 minutes, and doing so will naturally increase cellular carrier connect charges.

MyVoq is intelligent search software that lets you look for different types of data on the device with a single search. Once you find it, then you decide what to do—dial a number, send an e-mail, SMS or IR transmission, etc.

You can access MyVoq anytime by pressing the button below the joy stick. The program uses automatic fill-in features to make searching easier and faster. While it can be a powerful tool, MyVoq is not always the most intuitive program. It definitely requires a little learning.

Voice Dialing
The preloaded SmARTspeak NG software from Advanced Recognition Technologies Inc. (ART) lets you voice dial. I'm inclined to think voice dialing is more trouble than it's worth, but this software was relatively easy to set up and worked well enough. Pressing and holding the small, narrow Record button on the right edge of the device automatically launches SmARTspeak.


See Record Button Above Open Keyboard

The program prompts you to speak one of the four commands: Calendar, Call, Contacts, Dial. Calendar and Contacts simply launch applets. If you say Call, the program prompts for a name.

It must be one you have previously recorded as a "voice tag" attached to a Contacts record. If you say Dial, it prompts you for a number.

You don't have to "train" the speech recognition engine in SmARTspeaking to understand how you say numerals. In that respect, it's speaker independent.

If you press and release the Record button, incidentally, it brings up a Voice Notes recorder applet. Press and release again and it starts recording.

Interface
The most striking thing about the Voq phone and perhaps the most important thing to evaluate is the physical user interface. I generally like it, though I have a few minor quibbles.

I wondered first of all if the screen was big enough for the handheld applications and screen interface. It is, but just barely.

The Home screen features a top bar with icons showing the status of the network connection and battery charge. Below it is a scrollable horizontal toolbar with icons for the most-used applets, the most recently used appearing first.

Below this are sections with appointment reminders and selected set-up options. At the very bottom of the screen—whichever application is running—there are two context sensitive soft buttons. On the Home screen, the left soft button is the Start key, which brings up the familiar Microsoft Start menu.


Voq Home Page

Navigation
Directly below the screen itself are the unlabeled hardware buttons you push to select the soft button functions. They flank a very well designed, positive-feeling joy stick that is also used for different tasks depending on context—mostly scrolling menus, text and Web pages, but other things as well, such as increasing and decreasing sound volume in Media Player.

Also on either side of the joystick are the Start and End call buttons with green and red phone icons. Below them on the left side is a Home key and on the right, a back arrow key. One of my quibbles is with the way the back arrow key works. In most cases, it moves you back, browser-style, through previously viewed screens. But in MyVoq for some reason it functions as a backspace key instead, which is confusing.

Keyboard
The Voq keyboard is good, but not quite as good as most Blackberry keyboards. Part of the problem is the hinge in the middle of the thing, which gets in the way sometimes.


Thumb-Typing with Keyboard

The keyboard is also a little wide and the keys come too close to the right edge to make it easy to curl your thumb in to hit them. Part of the problem is also the way it works with some of the software - you often find yourself having to move from keyboard to joy stick to soft buttons.

Music
The Voq phone ships with a monaural ear bud headset with microphone for hands free phoning. You really need a stereo headset for listening to digital music using Windows Media Player, though. You, like me, may already have one.

The trouble is, the Voq phone has a 2.55 mm jack. Most stereo headphones use a larger plug. I was unable to properly test the music play-back functions. High-bitrate files played skip free, but they sounded terrible on the supplied headset, not surprisingly.

Conclusion If you like the idea of combining PDA and phone but you've tried a Pocket PC Phone and found it too clunky and awkward, the Voq Professional Phone may be the solution. The screen and the interface impressed me, but the screen is a bit small, and the interface is not as easy or intuitive as standard touch screen PDA interfaces.

In other words, there are, as usual, trade-offs to be made.