Welcome back! Hope you all have had an interesting week and let the essence of both the HTC Touch and Apple's Iphone sink into the deepest crevices of your subconscious. This week’s topic: the battle of the bulge...

While there are a few of you who would love the be on board with this whole touch screen technology thing, most of you want (need) a physical keyboard to type, which, consequently, forces you lean toward some of the bulkier options that are available in the marketplace. With that being said, we are going to discuss four of the major competitors' answer to the QWERTY sliding keyboard phenomenon. All four of these phones run on the Windows Mobile platform and all of them are manufactured by HTC corp.

AT&T 8925- Now this thing has power! A 3 mega pixel camera w/ auto flash, A Tilt screen so it actually looks like a mini-computer for watching movies and video clips, 3G for enhanced downloading speed (almost a must for watching video and listen to radio streams), Wifi, Bluetooth, GPS just in case you loose your way, and of course a full qwerty keyboard. This is an upgrade to Cingular’s 8525, which is actually more comparable to both Sprint’s Mogul and Verizon’s XV6800 than this phone. Cingular always seems to release HTC phones before everyone else and actually has more of a history with HTC. So it's no wonder that they have the most advanced sliding qwerty out there. Don’t be surprised if Sprint and Verizon eventually follow suit with their version of the Tilt, released sometime in 08. I went to the Cingular store and played with this phone; It's pretty cool, but I would wonder how many times one can actually tilt the screen without the phone losing it’s tilt functionality. The demo that I saw had obviously been used quite a bit, since the tilt was not functioning as it should.

PPC 6800 - codename: Sprint Mogul - This device is pretty cool as well. It basically has all of the components on the AT&T Tilt, without the Tilt screen. It’s a little lighter and the sliding keyboard slides to the left as opposed to the older models that slide to the right. This phone has 256 MB ram and only 64 MB of ROM, which means that while its good, it’s not great. It’s the upgrade to Sprint’s second PPC (pocket pc) phone, the PPC 6700 - codename: PPC 6700. Physically, it’s everything that a mogul should be. Sleek, built in wifi, no external antennae...I think they should have waited to release this one though, because it had/has so many bugs. Not to mention the re-release of upgrade software that HTC and Sprint had to put up on the website so customers could fix their own phones. I actually have this phone in my collection. I waited and waited for it, then had so many issues when I got it, I wondered why I waited so long. The phone still has issues, even after the upgrades, which is probably why it took Verizon so long to release its version. What’s really compelling is that Sprint did make a public apology of sorts. Read about it right here. http://forums.buzzaboutwireless.com/baw/board/message?board.id=SmartPhones&thread.id=2262

T-Mobile Wing - This bad boy is yet another HTC model that is considered an upgrade to T-Mobile MDX. Physically it looks like a variant to the Mogul….except it has a pretty electric blue color . The one thing that’s different about the Wing is the amount of memory. This sporty looking phone only has 128MB of Ram and 64 MB of Rom, which is about half the amount of memory in its competitors. Despite its shortcomings, the blue variant was a hot seller for T-Mobile. T-Mobile has also customized their version of the popular HTC gadget with its own software such as MyFavs, which allows users to have their favorite five members right there on the homescreen to easily makes calls. The good thing about this phone is now that T-Mobile has implemented its wifi-hot spot program so it probably can be used with wifi rather than T-Mobile’s less than reliable service. But at least you will get the most whenever minutes of any carrier.

Verizon XV6800 - This phone has got to be the most long awaited phone ever. It’s predecessor, the XV6700, was released in early 2006 and most of the other companies got on the bandwagon by releasing upgrades to this popular phone. Verizon just laid in the cut and took its sweet little time to release this new model. In fact, it was actually just released last month. In a nutshell, this phone is just the like the Mogul; however, it’s clad in Verizon’s get up and even sports the popular V-Cast software so people can watch real live video clips via their phone. Havent really seen or tested the XV6800 in person, but it looks like Verizon took so much time with this one because they saw all of the problems Sprint was having with the Mogul. So while it's virtually the same, something tells me that this one will at least work better than the Mogul and there won’t be any public apologies like there was from sprint.

Well that’s all for now folks…tune in next week, where we keep you in sync with the latest and greatest with these wonderful necessities we call cell phones.