Rare Touchscreen Hallmark of Compact Windows Smartphone

location based services


By James Alan MillerJune 12, 2006


Click to ViewAt the Computex tradeshow in Taipei, Taiwan last week, Taiwanese vendor OKWAP showed off a pair of upcoming Windows Mobile 5.0 handsets, one a Pocket PC Phone with a keypad - fairly unique in a world where most devices built on this platform feature a keyboard nowadays - and a Smartphone, with, of all things, a touchscreen.
That's right, the K728 offers pen input. Why is that so strange? Because phones built on the Smartphone edition of the Windows Mobile operating system (OS) aren’t supposed to have touchscreens. It is part of what differentiates them from Pocket PCs.
While some future version of Windows Mobile may merge the two versions of the platform, the K728 purports to add this Pocket PC-like functionality through OKWAP itself—in the same manner with which Palm, Inc. brings a whole host of features to its Treo smartphones, for example; beyond the capabilities of whatever OS they're built on, Palm or Microsoft.
In additoin to touch support, the tiny K728 sports a slider design, not very common in Windows Smartphone land, and - at only 3.7 x 1.8 x 0.96 inches (93.5 x 46 x 24.5 millimiters) and 3.8 ounces (107.8 grams) - is much smaller than your typical Pocket PC Phone.
The tri-band GSM/GPRS smartphone's specifications are also robust for Windows Smartphone.
There's a 400 MHz Samsung S3C2442A processor, 128 MB ROM, 64 MB RAM, miniSD slot for storage expansion, 2.0 megapixel camera, Bluetooth 2.0 (with A2DP support for wireless stereo headsets), a 176 x 220 display, and the Microsoft push e-mail client already installed.
The Pocket PC Phone from OKWAP mentioned at the top of this article is called the K868, also a tri-band GSM/GPRS smartphone. Aside from a slight 3.5 ounces (100 gram) weight and the keypad, which may actually make it less useful for messaging for some than today's more common keyboard models, the device sports some fairly typical Pocket PC handset features.
It also has a Pocket PC typical 2.4-inch 240 x 320 pixel (QVGA) resolution display, Bluetooth 2.0 (with A2DP), a 2.0 megapixel camera, 64 MB of RAM, 128 MB of ROM, USB connectivity, a SDIO enabled SD slot for memory and peripheral expansion, OCR/BCR/QR 2D barcode support, and a Intel PXA270 416MHz processor. As with the K728, there's also support for Microsoft's push e-mail solution.
With push (available most famously in RIM's BlackBerry solutions), when a server receives a message, it is automatically sent to a mobile device instead of the user having to manually pull it down or schedule retrievals at set intervals.
Microsoft only started providing push e-mail support to Exchange through the wireless messaging-centric Exchange Server Service Pack 2 on the backend last fall. In February, it unveiled an on-device client for Windows Mobile smartphones to take advantage of push e-mail. Since that time, some carriers and manufactures have announced a Direct Push client or AKU2 (Adaptation Kit Update) upgrade for their smartphones.
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