Sierra Wireless jumps into Microsoft Smartphone market

Sierra Wireless Inc. marked its entrance into the Smartphone market with the launch of the Voq phone, which runs Microsoft Corp.’s Smartphone 2003 operating system, Sierra announced Wednesday.

The Voq phone resembles nothing in the current market for Smartphones, with a flip-cover that opens to the left to reveal a traditional keyboard layout. When closed, the phone looks like an ordinary cell phone, with a dialing keypad and several other menu buttons visible.

The phone weighs in at 4.73 ounces (135 grams), and when closed measures 133mm long by 57 mm wide by 22 mm thick. The 2.2-inch color screen is 176 pixels by 220 pixels.

“I thought it was a pretty creative idea to put a (traditional) keypad on the base. They’ve certainly done something innovative with the flip-phone design,” said Ken Hyers, senior analyst with In-Stat/MDR based in Newton, Massachusetts.

Sierra Wireless is best known for its Air Card products, which connect notebook PCs to GSM/GPRS (Global System for Mobile Communications/General Packet Radio Services) or CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) networks with PC cards. The company has reached a point where it needed to find other areas of growth, and identified the Smartphone market as a prime opportunity, said Andrew Harries, senior vice president of marketing.

The Voq phone is like other Smartphones in that it features both personal digital assistant capabilities and voice and data communications over advanced networks, but Sierra added push e-mail to this device, Harries said. Push e-mail technology delivers e-mail as it is received by the server directly to the client device without the user having to access the server and download the e-mail in batches.

Other popular push e-mail devices such as Research in Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry require corporations to install special software to deliver corporate e-mail to mobile devices, but Sierra installed client-side VPN (virtual private network) technology that works with a company’s existing VPN software to connect this device directly with existing e-mail servers, Harries said.

The phone is a triband (900MHz/1800MHz/1900MHz) GSM/GPRS phone, and will be sold in both Europe and North America to start, Harries said.

It uses a 200MHz PXA262 XScale processor from Intel Corp., and comes with 48MB of ROM and 32MB of RAM, said Larry Zibrik, product line manager for the Voq phone.

Sierra was trying to strike the best balance between performance and battery life with the XScale processor, Zibrik said. Users will be able to store more data than competing Smartphones in ROM, which can be accessed more quickly than other types of memory, he said.

Pricing for the device has not yet been finalized, Harries said. Sierra is in discussions with U.S. and European GSM/GPRS carriers that might launch the phone, and wireless carriers have a great deal of influence over the end price of a cell phone with various subsidies and special offers, he said.

The Voq phone is designed as a high-end phone, and will mostly likely cost between $300 and $400, Harries said. Carrier subsidies could bring that price down by up to $150 by the time the phone is rolled out by the middle of next year, Hyers said.