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Sierra Wireless admits: we're the Microsoft smartphone company

After all the speculation and guesswork, Microsoft's new Windows Mobile smartphone partner isn't Samsung, and isn't even RIM. It's Sierra Wireless, of whom so many in the phone business have said: "Who?"

Sierra is actually well known - but it is best known for its PC cards. They are genuine GSM cards, and they are sold, under label, by people like MMO2 and Vodafone for their data subscribers. You plug them into the PC slot, and the PC can connect to the Internet over GPRS. Its main rival in this area is Option of Belgium.

It's not obvious that anybody will ever know they've bought a "Voq" phone from Sierra, because the company expects to carry on selling, to business users, via phone companies - exactly as before. But you'll certainly recognise the phone, because it's unique. Look at the keyboard ...

It's chunky, its not ornate but it's definitely a phone and, says Todd Heintz, marketing director of the Vancouver firm, it's going to attract the business user who is interested in RoI. This, says Heintz, is the phone which is a phone first, but has all the corporate functionality that a PDA would provide.

The company's philsophy is spot on: if you leave the device behind, it doesn't matter how clever it is. It's failed the test. People will leave their PDAs behind when they finish with the office; they'll take their phones with them to a party.

"In general what we're doing is to put the phone first, but provide all the PDA functionality; this is our entry into 'professional phone' category. We're marketing this new Voq line of products through our normal carrier partners, and through vertical market specialists, direct to business users," said Heintz.

The phone really doesn't look like any other phone in the world.

The keyboard, when you first look at it, looks like any standard phone dial, with buttons. But the hinge on the side gives it away; you open it, flip it sideways, and you have a complete QWERTY board. Tiny, but thumbable.

I tested the alpha prototype. The features which Sierra thinks will make this a winner are its office connectivity features - serverless email, serverless everything; no need to install any new IT equipment in head office - but unfortunately, the latest revision of the Windows Mobile 2003 software isn't quite ready, and neither is the hardware - which isn't due to ship until around April-June 2004. So it didn't work.

But the keyboard does. For the older generation of phone users, for whom a texted SMS is a nightmare, this will be a saviour. The only thing vaguely similar is the new Treo smartphone, which also has a complete qwerty keyboard - but without the quirky qwerty hinge.

The news will be a huge disappointment to many people who were really expecting Microsoft to pull a big rabbit out of the hat - an NEC, perhaps, or a Samsung. In fact, the product is probably exactly right for Microsoft network administrators, and the fact that the prototype is still a bit robust won't bother them.

What will, however, is the fact that Sierra's market research suggested - a year to 18 months ago - that Bluetooth was not going to be important. The result is that if you want to use the machine as a PDA and talk at the same time, you have to connect yourself with a tangle-prone wired headset. And if you want to connect to a PC, you need infra-red, or USB cable - another tangle option.

Given that Microsoft has fixed the Bluetooth problem with Windows Mobile 2003, this may not be a total disaster, because there is a Secure Digital socket. Bad news, though; this isn't an SD IO capable socket. But "that's fixable" as Todd Heintz said.

An interesting launch, and things will probably go very quiet for the next six months, as meetings are set up. The Sierra Wireless team will spend next week in Geneva, arranging to meet key potential customers and distributors. But apart form that, most people will probably forget the product till version 1.1 which offers a smarter body, and an alternative style, and, most importantly, Bluetooth - in a year or so.

And the name? "We wanted to "e-voq" the mobile person in all of us." Oh ...