The HTC Mogul: Sprint's Answer to the IPhone

The Sprint PPC-6800 is another PDA Phone made by HTC. If you buy the Sprint PPC-6800 overseas or through HTC, it is more commonly called the HTC Mogul. The HTC Mogul's design would remind you of AT&T's 8525, it has a large screen and slide it sideways, you can see the QWERTY keyboard.

Like any PDA Phone that runs Windows Mobile, the HTC Mogul has everything except your kitchen sink. First, it has a 2.8 inch TFT screen with 64k colors and 240 x 320 screen resolution, a 400 MHz processor, 64 MB or RAM, 256 MB of ROM, 2 mega pixel camera, Infrared, WiFi 802.11 b/g, Bluetooth, microSD slot, and Windows Mobile 6.0 OS.

One of the biggest disadvantage of owning a PDA phone is its bulk and size. The HTC Mogul weighs 5.8 oz and has dimensions of 2.3 inch width, .7 inch diameter, and 4.3 inch in height. It would really show when you pocket the device and although some men really don't mind pocketing a bulky device, this would be a big turn-off for the ladies.

One plus factor of the HTC Mogul is its tactile QWERTY keyboard. The keys are evenly spaced and you won't have any problems typing but if you'd rather have the PDA experience, you can choose to write your SMS messages with the stylus since the HTC Mogul has excellent handwriting recognition. Operating the device with one hand is also easy since there's a Blackberry-like jog dial and a 5 way navigation button on the front.

One downside of this device is that it has a limited program memory, a measly 64MB. Older windows mobile devices running on Windows 2003SE has the ability to allocate the memory between RAM and ROM. I don't know whether to blame HTC or Windows for this but I wish that they would just bring back this feature on future Windows Mobile devices. Though you can customize your HTC Mogul since you can choose which applications you can load (and even make your own if you're a program developer), be aware that you can't put too many or run everything at the same time because you would experience extreme lag times and if you're a very impatient person, you would feel the urge to throw this device.

If you're going to buy this phone for its camera, forget it, like similar devices, image quality is crappy. Colors are more whitish and looks all washed out, though it does offer white balance and different color effect settings, but it would be no use as images all come out the same way.

You can also make use of Sprint's EV-DO network and make use of your HTC mogul as a modem and get connected to the Internet at 3G speeds if you're not in a WiFi hotspot. All in all, the HTC Mogul is a very powerful device, and with a little tweaking and technical expertise, you can make use of everything the HTC Mogul has to offer.