Earlier this year, T-Mobile’s German wing announced the latest in the company’s own-brand MDA handset family, the 3G-enabled MDA IV “mini laptop”, made by Taiwan’s HTC and also known by its codename, ‘Universal’. It includes a QWERTY keyboard located below a 640 x 480 display that not only folds up and away from the keyboard clamshell-style, but also rotates. The unit sports two cameras, and comes equipped with a tri-band GSM/GPRS radio. Like the MDA III, the new model features Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. There’s USB for wired connections to a PC. T-Mobile also said it would offer a push email service with the unit.

Inside the unit is a 520MHz Intel XScale PXA270 processor running Windows Mobile software, though at this stage the version remains unclear. It may be Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition, or possibly its successor, T-Mobile said.

Since then, Orange has indicated that it too will offer a network-branded version of a device that sounds uncannily like the MDA IV, and Vodafone has gone on record to say it will offer the machine as the VPA IV. Neither company has put a date to the release of their respective versions of the product beyond a broad “later this year”. HTC hasn’t given any availability guidance, either.

It’s unclear at this stage why the delay has arisen. One possibility is a pause to allow the device to ship with Windows Mobile 2005, aka ‘Magneto’, the next major revision of Microsoft’s smart phone operating system. Most networks have been vague about which version of Windows Mobile the device will support.

Vodafone and Toshiba today announced a strategic partnership to market a range of exclusive 3G handsets in Europe, Australia, Japan and New Zealand. Building on their partnership in Japan, where Toshiba is one of the leading suppliers of handsets to Vodafone KK, this expanded relationship marks Toshiba’s entrance into the European mobile phone market.

The companies will work together to market a range of exclusive 3G handsets starting in the second quarter of 2005. The first handset to be made available under the new relationship is the Vodafone TS 921, a high tier multi-functional, tri-band device complete with a 1.9 Megapixel camera with auto focus.

Key features:

• 1.92 Megapixel camera, with auto focus
• 2.4 inch display
• Triband 900, 1800, 1900
• Video output
• High-quality Mpeg4 format
• SDTM expandable memory card
• 360 hrs standby
• 320 min talktime

Vodafone is adding a 3G-compatible model to its VPA (Vodafone Personal Assistant) product family. The new Pocket PC Phone Edition will be presented at Cebit 2005 and is set to be available from Summer 2005, initially in Germany.

The new VPA IV has a QWERTZ (German layout) keypad for convenient text entry. As with a notebook, its display is folded out behind the keypad when users are writing or browsing the Web. The VPA IV is equipped with a 520MHz Intel processor and uses the Windows Mobile Pocket PC Phone Edition 2003 OS. The new device comes with standard Windows Mobile applications like Pocket Outlook for e-mail, calendar and contacts management, Pocket Internet Explorer for web browsing, and office applications like Pocket Word and Pockt Excel. The internal 128 MB memory can be upgraded with SD/MMC cards, while the SD adapter is SDIO compliant.

The VPA IV measures 131.6mm (h) x 79mm (w) x 21.6mm (d) when folded. The device also offers Bluetooth, infrared and mini USB as means to connect to other devices.

The VPA IV connects to 3G (UMTS) mobile networks, as well as being a tri-band GSM/GPRS device. It has built-in wireless LAN, which enables users to connect to faster networks available at home, at the office or in hotspots.

Users can enjoy multimedia with two loudspeakers for stereo sound and two cameras which, among other features, enable photos and videos to be recorded and sent and video calls to be made when connected to a 3G network.

Thanks to a fold and tilt mechanism, the VPA IV can also take the shape of a “normal” PDA. In this way, users can make phone calls and work as if using a standard Pocket PC Phone Edition. The large display, loudspeakers and microphone are then located at the front, the keypad is hidden and entries are made using a stylus on the touch-screen.